[vfc1]

Unprocessed foods or food with minimal processing are healthier. Unprocessed meaning: nothing good was removed and nothing bad was added.

The act of processing removes nutrients from the food and adds preservatives and other chemicals, it modifies a lot the chemical composition of the food.

[frafra]

Sorry, but "chemicals" is another meaningless word. Everything is chemical, a molecule has no memory, so it does not matter how it has been produced.

Unprocessed vs processed: I was not talking about that, but your statement is not always valid, it depends from what the process does. "unprocessed milk" is more dangerous for example. My point is that reality is way more complex than "natural" vs "non-natural" and so on, and there is a lot of marketing going on which reinforces unscientific ideas.

[vfc1]

Our body had evolved to eat whole foods and not some distilled version of it, like oils or protein extracts.

Our bodies react not only to the presence of a given molecule but to the other types of molecules that were ingested at the same time, the amount, and how those molecules react to each other.

A whole food has thousands of different compounds in it, that interact in ways that we can only now begin to image, together with undigestable compounds such as fiber that pass right through us but that feed bacteria in our gut that then produce nutrients that we also need, in a symbiotic (or sometimes parasitical) relation.

The meaning that a food is a whole food, does not mean that is not made of the same molecules as an extract, but that it is provided in the relative amounts and in the right combination with other molecules that our bodies (including our gut bacteria) have evolved to consume.