Whole Health

Photo Credit: Mari

With the release of the new whole-wheat Krispy Kreme donut, we find ourselves reflecting on what it is to be a health food.

Yes, the whole wheat Krispy Kreme donut has 3 times as much fiber as its white counterpart, but that's still less than half the amount provided by a small pear. Both donuts have equal amounts of sugar and fat (almost 20% of your daily value in 1 donut). In fact, both donuts contain more trans fat than saturated fat! (Even more harmful than LDL-cholesterol raising saturated fat, trans fats not only increase LDL, but also decrease protective HDL-cholesterol.)

In another example of supposedly healthful improvements that don't fix the core problem, some restaurants are making their deep-fat fryers trans-fat free. While excluding trans fat is great, the oil used in commercial deep fat fryers is generally changed only once a week, so the fat, which is heated to high temperatures all day long every day, becomes highly oxidized and loaded with free radicals harmful to our tissues, even without the trans fat.

But is this the best way to criticize an aspiring health food? Maybe we should instead complain because we can't imagine a donut growing.

An Introduction to Whole Foods

What are whole foods? Minimally processed foods that once had a life of their own and retain the vast majority of their nutrients, such as an apple, a fish, and brown rice.

Processed foods typically have most of their nutrients removed and chemicals added to bleach, color, preserve, modify the texture, and add back flavor. Their chemistry may also be altered in a harmful way (such as the oil being oxidized when exposed to high heat, air, and light).

Even refined grains in the U.S. are good sources of the vitamins B1, B2, B3. Why? Not because they are naturally present in whole grains since they are refined out during processing, but because they are legally required to be added back in to prevent people from developing severe deficiency diseases, such as berberi and pellagra.

But B vitamins are far from all that's lost in the refining process. There are thousands of beneficial phytochemicals (non-vitamin, non-mineral compounds), such as polyphenols, that are continuously being discovered in plant foods, which are eliminated during processing. It is neither practical nor financially viable for food manufacturers to add back in all of the healthful compounds we currently know about that were originally provided by the whole food.

Since people began analyzing the constituents of foods in labs, they have viewed foods as a sum of their parts. But foods are a lot more than their vitamins, minerals, protein, fat and carbohydrate, and overemphasizing the importance of a single compound causes trouble. For example, when we remove naturally occurring fat to make a food low-fat, we typically lose the fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, E and K as well.

Fad diets are a great example of latching onto a component of food, like carbs, fat, or macronutrient ratios, instead of focusing on whether the food itself promotes health. When we look at populations of the world in which people live long and healthy lives, we find that they enjoy a colorful and varied diet of whole foods, and that when they begin to eat processed foods, their rates of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer skyrocket.

Finding Real "Health" Food

Photo Credit: Mary Gaston

Real health foods are whole, nutrient-dense and minimally processed. Even though there is one whole food ingredient in the new Krispy Kreme donut, it is not a health food because the rest of its ingredients are heavily processed, and it is cooked in an unhealthy way. Whole wheat bread products should be satisfyingly chewy, not soft and weightless like white bread.

Real health foods often need refrigeration, but usually require little or no packaging. If they are packaged, their ingredient list will be short and comprised of words you recognize as foods. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store and don't go down the aisles, or better yet, shop at a farmer's market offering locally grown foods.

References:

1. Suzuki M, Wilcox BJ, Wilcox CD. Implications from and for food cultures for cardiovascular disease: longevity. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2001;10(2):165-71.
2. Weisburger JH. Lifestyle, health and disease prevention: the underlying mechanisms. Eur J Cancer Prev. 2002 Aug;11 Suppl 2:S1-7.
3. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Andrew Price. (La Mesa, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation; 2004)

Related Topics:

• WebMD Video: Superfoods - Pumpkin, Walnuts, Spinach, Kale
• WebMD Video: Eating by the Numbers

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