The Synergy of Healthy Whole Foods

Info source:

http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/the-benefits-of-healthy-whole-foods

The Synergy of Healthy Whole Foods

"One of the biggest advantages of eating whole foods is that you're getting the natural synergy of all of these nutrients together," says Gidus.

Gidus points to studies of vitamin E, selenium, and a number of antioxidants. We know that when they're eaten in food, they have all sorts of health benefits. But studies of the single vitamins and minerals in supplement form have not shown the same success. Why? "It could be the natural combination and interaction of all of these different phytochemicals and proteins that give a food its health benefit," Gidus says. "Trying to extract a single nutrient and take it by itself may not work."

There's another thing. We simply don't know all of the nutrients in a food that make it healthy.

"Nutrition science is always discovering new components of foods, things that we didn't know are there," says Kaiser. "Many of them are not even available in supplement form." If we don't know what they are, we obviously can't synthesize them.