No matter how much we understand about a whole food, the whole is still so much greater than the sum of its parts. We can take it apart and study each component, isolate the most favorable ones, and study them some more, but still cannot synthesize all the benefits. Sure, there are some great components in foods that can be isolated and taken alone, like Bromelain, but we still benefit from eating the whole food. I tend to focus too much on the suppments, when following the BTD with a variety of beneficial foods does more for me than a cupboard full of supplements, high quality and beneficial as they are.

A food may have something considered bad in its own right, like sugar or fat, but when kept intact with the whole food, as God and nature intended, it can work together in the type of synergy that can have miraculous healing properties. Sugar can be bound to antioxidants that target the areas that get damaged by isolated sugar alone. Caffeine can be bound to polyphenols to target the liver cells that need the polyphenols most. More connections will be discovered, but why wait for science? Eat the whole beneficials today! Many are in season right now, and many others soon will be. Organic produce is getting easier to find, and fresher looking on the shelves. Fresh Wild Salmon can now be found in many grocery stores...sure it costs more, but the prices are coming down, and the flavor is incredible. It's getting easier to eat right.

Sure, it's getting easier to eat wrong as well, but we know how to navigate that. Shop around the perimeter of the store for the most whole foods...it's good for your shopping bill and your health, to buy it whole and prepare it at home. It also doesn't take much more time to cook a simple healthy meal than it takes to pick a restaurant and pick up some take-out.

Whereas processed foods are a conglomeration, a miscellaneous collection of unrelated parts, parts isolated from their sources and jumbled together; whole foods are a symphony and a composition, where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. In your kitchen you can arrange different parts from different symphonies together to make a nice meal, but in a food scientist's lab you often get discord punctuated by monotony, with a little extra additive thrown in to make it appealing.