Thanks.

No -- it's fragmented.

The carob pod would be the whole food.

Yes, it is a whole food. It is carob ground into a powder.

This is the same process as blending or grinding.

I grind my sunflower and flax seeds into a powder with a coffee grinder. The seed powder is still a whole food.

I blend my greens into a smoothie, the smoothie is still a whole food.

It is the same with the Green Superfood Powders, the green powder is still a whole food

The point of choosing whole over ground/fragmented food within the realm of raw is because of oxidation.

If you grind your sunflower and flax seeds into a powder and then consume the powder immediately, then yes, that is the whole food, as there has not been enough time for significant oxidation to take place.

If, however, you store that same sunfloxer/flax powder for 2 weeks and then consume it, IMO it is no longer whole, for nutrients have been lost via oxidation.

Therefore I would agree that foods that are freshly ground or blended and then immediately consumed are still whole, however if the ground food has been stored for an extended period of time, as carob powder typicially is, then IMO it is no longer whole, for nutrients have been lost via oxidation.

<It is the same with the Green Superfood Powders, the green powder is still a whole food.>

I disagree with that. Green powders are dehydrated and therefore besides the fragmenting (which creates oxidation), the water has been removed from the original food. IMO a food without its original water is no longer whole -- it is dehydrated. I define whole as containing everything that it did in its original form.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2008 07:13PM by learningtofly.

If anything has been ground, it is not considered "whole" anymore. It has been processed to a degree. Alot of spins or opinions though where you can debate for days on it being good or bad or optimum, etc.

Yeah, I thought about it some more, and I don't think it's anywhere near as complicated as I made it in my second post. I'm going back to my first answer.

The analogy I came up with is this: if you took a drinking glass and put it in a food processor, and processed the glass into a a hundred pieces, would you still say that the glass was whole?