Less than a century ago, our diet was made up entirely of whole foods. Nowadays, many people in our society wouldn’t know how to prepare a whole food for eating if they were stuck on an episode of Survivor.

Yet to have a healthful and nutritionally-sound diet, highly-processed foods should make up less than 20% of our daily feed. But what exactly does the term “whole foods” mean, and why are they so important to a healthy body?

The term “whole foods” has been thrown around so loosely that many people confuse it with “organic.” Make no mistake: these do not mean the same thing.

Organic refers to foods or ingredients grown in a chemical-free environment, without the use of artificial pesticides, fertilizers or hormones.

Whole food is food that has only one ingredient: itself in its natural form. In other words, a food that hasn’t been processed into another state.

Organic foods can be processed and still be called organic if they are made with organic ingredients. For instance, you can have a package of organic cookies in which the cookies have been made with all organic ingredients, but this is still considered a processed food because the ingredients have been altered from their original state. The wheat has been ground, the sugar has been extracted from the cane… etc.

While it is certainly an admirable goal to eat organic, we should strive to include whole foods in our daily diet as well.

Why are whole foods so important?

Our bodies — our systems for digestion, absorption, and metabolism – evolved to utilize nutrients in the amounts and combinations provided by the food that grows naturally on this planet. Foods are made up of hundreds of different, health-giving substances that work together synchronistically to deliver health. The only way to take advantage of this packaging is by eating the whole food itself rather than a product that is a derivative of it.

Many biochemical researchers, nutritionists and herbalists believe that the body will never achieve maximum nutrition and an ultimate healthy state without whole foods. Vitamin supplements do not replace the nutritional value of whole foods because vitamins only resemble selected parts of a food.

| Continued >>