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The Whole Story on Whole Foods
Why They're Important for a Healthy Body
By Elizabeth Yarnell
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 percent of our daily feed. But what exactly does the term "whole foods" mean, and why are they so important to a healthy body?
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.