[rubashov]

> Processing makes more nutrients available to the body.

This is certainly true, but it's just as important that processing eliminates toxins. Despite the moaning you hear about processed food, a major problem is that our modern diet is under-processed.

There are many foods that used to universally be soaked & aged, sprouted, fermented, or treated with lye, or a combination of these steps, in order to eliminate anti-nutrients and allergens. This is rarely done on the modern industrial scale for reasons of cost. Modern flour is not the same thing as people were eating 150 years ago. The native americans always treated corn with lye. The settlers didn't and consequently got pellagra, and we continue to eat untreated corn.

Read Stephan Guyenet and the Weston Price Foundation have literature on various traditional processing steps and chemically what they were achieving.