For some time now I've been thinking about fractionated food and wondering
just how paleo it could possibly be to use a part instead of a whole,
especially when that part is absolutely technology dependent.  Every time I
take the lid off the olive or coconut oil, I think about this.  And now
after reading today that almond flour is fractionated, I really don't know
what to think.  Shouldn't we be eating the entire food, since presumably its
parts work together as a nutritious whole, and it would be the whole food
that humans evolved to eat and still derive the most benefit from?

I mentioned a while back that the Eades say that the nutrients in salad
greens aren't available unless they are drenched in oil.  You know, for some
reason I just can't imagine that Paleo diners kept a cruet jar handy, or
that they had a slab of fatty meat to eat every single time they had greens.
Don't you imagine that there were probably plenty of times they had one or
the other food but not both at the same time?  (Shades of the recent
acid-alkaline thread.)  If/when they ate greens alone, was the nutrition
completely wasted on them?  I have a hard time believing that it was.  But
I'm not a nutritionist or a person particularly in the know.

I truly believe that fat is important in the diet and we've got to have it,
but isn't it in some sense a kind of artificial nutrition to pour it out of
a bottle to get it?  --Or a deficient nutrition to remove the oil from the
almonds to render it into a product that more resembles the familiar "other"
flour?  I can see the $$ benefits that almond producers would like--two
marketable products from one source, and a longer shelf life for the almond
flour--but at what cost to us?

Is there anyone on this list who doesn't cook with or use additional
oils/fats?  Or anyone with similar concerns about fractionated foods?

Theola