Posted by Janet Harriett on Aug.19, 2010

ⓒ iStockPhoto - feverpitched

Whole foods - the general idea of eating close to nature, not the supermarket of the same name - provides the foundation for many healthful dietary styles. At the core, whole foods are basically foods that you could identify from your fridge or pantry if you went out to a garden, orchard or farm. You could go to a barn and pick up an egg, but not a chicken nugget. In a field, you could see tomatoes, but not ketchup, beans but not a burrito.

As with so many food styles that have advocates, whole foods have some fuzzy borders. Depending on who you ask, certain grains like oats may or may not be whole foods, since they require milling to be edible. Entire websites are devoted to what extent animal foods can be whole foods, like whether a boiled lobster is whole food while a grilled chicken breast isn’t. With the fuzzy borders comes myths about the nature and capabilities of whole foods.

Myth #1: Whole Foods are Better Because They’re Whole

Even with whole foods, we rarely eat the entire thing. Beans are considered a whole food even though the pods and vines go to compost. Apples are a whole food even though the tree is still in the orchard. The part of a food that we define as being the “whole food” varies from item to item. Some foods, we eat the fruiting body, while others we eat the leaves. Beets have edible leaves and taproots, but beetroot and beet greens are generally accepted as whole foods separate from one another.

Myth #2: Whole Foods are Living

This myth is primarily applied to fruits vegetables, since whole food animal products like shellfish have much clearer life signs. You can’t hook up electrodes to a head of lettuce to look for brainwave activity, or feel for a pulse. The simple biological fact is that once a fruit, leaf or fruit is separated from the plant, it’s dead. Picking a fruit or vegetable triggers a release of enzymes that cause the plant to decay at a faster rate than if left on the plant, though even left on the plant, fruits rot and leaves wither.

Grain of truth: The one exception to this is sprouts. If uncooked, fresh sprouts generally are alive, inasmuch as they would continue to grow if left uneaten.

Myth #3: You Have to Eat 100% Whole Foods to be Healthy

Whole foods provide the foundation for many healthy eating styles. A raw food diet is basically whole food vegan. Because whole foods contain all of the fiber, protein, fats, carbohydrates and phytonutrients in the

Grain of Truth: In general, a diet heavy on whole foods is healthier, since it provides less opportunity for junk food or nonfoods, but there is room in a healthy lifestyle for a range of foods, depending on your nutritional needs and digestive capabilities.

Myth #4: Whole Foods are Healthier Because They’re Closer to Nature

This isn’t entirely a myth; however, it does demonstrate faulty causality. The reliance on nature as the final arbiter of what is and is not healthy fails to recognize that nature is not wholeheartedly committed to our survival as a species or individuals. Plenty of natural things are also quite toxic, or at least not health-promoting. Poison ivy grows rampant in nature; I’m not going to make a salad of it.

Grain of Truth: The less processing something undergoes, the fewer opportunities there are to extract healthy elements of the food or add in something less healthy.

Myth #5: Preservatives are Bad

Preservatives are a whole family of ingredients, and although many of them are the product of food science and have some alarming origins, not all preservatives are detrimental to health. Vitamin C is a common preservative, as is salt; insufficient amounts of either can be bad for one’s health. Moreover, preservatives are what let us eat in winter if we live in a climate without a 12-month growing season.

Myth #6: Processed Foods are Poison/Toxic

Processed foods aren’t generally as good for health as the whole food counterpart - I’ll take fresh berries over jam any day of the week - but let’s get rational. There’s a lot of room between “Not good for you” and “Poison.” On the other side of the coin, there is also a lot of room between “Healthy” and “Will cure (insert disease here).”

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Posted under Food Facts, Food, Nutrition & Recipes.