What exactly is a whole food?

When I first decided that I needed to cut all the crud out of my diet, my immediate thought was ‘easy, I’ll just eat whole foods.’ I was a bit surprised to discover that there really is no hard and true definition of what a whole food is.

As of this writing, Wikipedia.org - which seems to encompass the collective wisdom of the internet - defines whole foods as “foods that are unprocessed and unrefined, or processed and of course refined as little as possible before being consumed.” Foods that are unprocessed and unrefined I get. But bread, butter and cheese don’t grow on trees and yet I think most would consider those whole foods as well. So my challenge has been to determine at one point does, say a loaf of bread, cross the line from being raw ingredients refined as little as possible to a processed food. Despite all my reading on the subject of late, I’m not sure I quite know the answer to that yet.

To me, it seems like a no-brainer that any item containing artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors are not whole foods. I also tend to think that items with ingredients I cannot pronounce likely fall outside the whole foods category. And despite 7-Up’s assertion otherwise, I have a hard time thinking of high fructose corn syrup as all-natural goodness.

Where I have trouble is the minor ingredients found in many of the items on the shelf that I would consider to be whole foods. For example, does the vegetable coloring annatto in my cheese turn it from a whole food to a processed item? What is the malt flavoring listed in the ingredients of the “all-natural” bread I purchased at the store? And what about the pyrophosphate in the can of tuna?

I am possibly splitting hairs, but I can see where it might be easier to eat nothing other than fruit (www.fruitarian.com) and eliminate the agonizing over ingredients. While I don’t see a fruit diet in my future, it has become apparent that I need to develop some type of “game rules” for myself to guide my eating decisions.