[Kistle]

I'm with Shaun. Sausage = not processed in my book. Also Maple Syrup, while not "healthy" per se, is a whole food and significantly preferred to corn or alcohol syrups.

I actually view all breads and pastas as "processed", since they typically use flour. Flour can certainly be "whole" if ground from whole grains and not adulterated by a bunch of chemicals, but that is difficult and time-consuming to do.

And chickens/eggs/beef, etc... are hard to "classify", since they are all certainly "whole", that is where you have to focus on things like "free-range", grass-fed, "cage-free", etc... Same with fish..."wild-caught" vs "farmed".

It's interesting...even many of our fruits and vegetables are so "nutritionally diluted", due to high-pressure, non-rotational farming, that you end up getting cheated there as well. I have a friend who moved here from India and took a look at a huge, over-sized head of faded-green "broccoli" in a grocery store and said, "what the heck is that; ....that ain't broccoli".

"Organic" is certainly the way to go, but even then you have to be careful to avoid marketing hype around the organic terminology, and pay more attention to what you are actually buying. For example, I had some organic eggs this morning that were labeled as "laid by organic-fed, cage-free hens that HAVE ACCESS to the outdoors". While that sounds good, I don't necessarily believe that this is the same as a "farm-chicken".

Maybe we have strayed off-topic, and we should start a thread about "truly nutritious food".

JA