consciouseating
that nature provides and all the edible parts.” She limits them to those com- prising one ingredient, such as plants, whole grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds.
Animal foods are more challenging to categorize. Eggs are a whole food, but steaks are not, because they are one part of the entire animal. She includes small fish if we eat the head and bones, and small birds like quail. Whole milk is included, but not low-fat dairy. Colbin maintains that our bodies
WHOLE FOOD W
Greater than the Sum of its Parts by Margie King
estern science is obsessed with deconstructing food, researching and analyzing its
component parts, isolating the active ingredients, repackaging them in pills or powders and prescribing them in daily doses. But according to Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D., author of Food and Healing, this chemistry-based theory of nutrition is upside-down.
Colbin, founder and CEO of the
Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, in New York City, has crafted her own nutrition theory based on more than 30 years of nutrition prac- tice, teaching from a foundation that a whole food, like the complex human being consuming it, is greater than the sum of its parts. She defines whole foods as “those
know the difference between a whole food and an aggregation of isolated nutrients. We have evolved over thousands of years to eat the food that nature presents to us, and if that food has been fragmented, the body realizes it and seeks what’s missing. For example, if we eat fragment-
ed wheat like white bread, in which the bran and germ of the whole grain have been removed, the body will still be hungry and seek the missing part of the food, something with fiber or crunch. Likewise, health enthusiasts that devour wheat germ or wheat bran in isolation will also feel something is missing and may find themselves crav- ing refined flour in the form of cake or other baked goods. Table sugar is another example, a
fragment of sugar cane. Colbin calcu- lates that it takes 17 feet of sugar cane to make one cup of sugar. What’s miss- ing is mostly the cane’s water content and the result, she says, is that sugar makes you thirsty. It’s a big reason why when we drink a soda, ingesting an average equivalent of 12 teaspoons of sugar, we’re thirsty afterward and drink even more, creating a vicious cycle. Fruit juices are, by definition, a
fragmented food. When we drink orange or grapefruit juice, all or most of the fiber from the raw fruit is obviously missing. Craving something to chew, we may reach for chips or something crunchy. Vegetable juices may yield the same result. Colbin cautions that while vitamin
and mineral supplements can be help- ful in treating specific conditions or de- ficiencies, they nevertheless comprise fragments of food at best. She notes that
34 Collier/Lee Counties
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