Over the past few years, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about wholefoods, and why they are so profound in their healing abilities. I am not as healthy or vibrant as I would have been if I had grown up on wholefoods, but I can safely say that I have managed to avoid the trajectory of chronic illness. I still deal with residual issues from the diet I had in the first 31 years of my life and am still impacted by the medications I took over those years. I am not upset about this as my remaining health issues continue to motivate me to inspect deeper layers of healing. As I move down the wholefood journey, I lean more and more to foods that are closest to their natural state as possible. 

From the perspective of processing food, wholefoods can be looked at as a spectrum, with meat, fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds being the purest form of whole foods. Some ingredients like palm sugar and rice flour are still widely considered whole foods, being far less processed than say white sugar and vegetable oils. In my view, most foods, with some exceptions, become less healthful when processed.  As we begin to refine a whole food, it starts losing its ability to nourish and heal us. A healthy body is resilient and can handle the occasional load from moderately refined ingredients. However, I believe that in general, nothing trumps food with an intact cellular structure.