It's All Natural

I get kind of annoyed when I'm at the grocery store, much to Danielle's chagrin, when people blindly obsess "natural" products. It strikes me at times as a marketing ploy, because is there a food product out there that isn't natural? Velveeta cheese probably comes the closest to non-natural food -- I'm convinced it's plastic -- but this is really just playing with the definition of natural.

Steven Novella has a little article over at Skeptiblog that covers this topic nicely. Admittedly he quickly moves from natural food to natural medicine, but I think it is a great exposition on the "natural = healthy" conception. My only complaint (a very tiny one) is he makes the blanket assertion that health food companies knowingly use consumers' predilection for natural products to make money; it seems he attributes to them no motives other than monetary gain. While I would be foolish to claim this isn't the case for some companies, I would also be foolish to think that there are no vendors who actually believe in the "natural is better" state of their products, misguided as they may be. But don't let my little criticism detract from what is an excellent article.

Full disclosure: I bought into the health food/herbal remedy thing for a while. That is until someone pointed out arguments like Novella makes.

[Edit: the following is a post script added after Veronica's comment. 7/21, 15:17]

I probably should have clarified my position a bit better.

I get annoyed when people uncritically obsess "natural" products; i.e., if you tell me a product is better simply because the label says "natural", then we're going to argue. A point Novella was making was that there is no one, generally accepted definition for natural food. The situation is a bit different for foods with the "organic" label; there are certain guidelines which must be met to apply it, but no such guidelines for "natural" exist.

Blindly applying "chemicals are bad" is along the same lines. It is not the case that every chemical is harmful. But even beneficial molecular compounds can be harmful in the right quantities. This again is a point Novella made.

And again in the same vein, it's not the case that "processed" is necessarily bad. Almost all of the food we eat is processed in some manner or another. Even organic produce goes through machines which sort and wash; this is indeed processing. One of the few exceptions to this may be produce one buys at a farmer's market, but this is as far as I know a very small percentage of the U.S. food market.

What most people mean when they complain about processed foods seems to be that they don't agree with the method in which the food was prepared. The chemical food complaint seems to be that the preservatives, coloring, or flavoring is harmful to the body. I also think that some mean both when they talk about processed foods.

To the processed complaint I would say don't eat what you don't like. For example, I don't eat canned vegetables not because I think there is something inherently dangerous in the canning process, but because most canned vegetables taste like mush to me.

The chemical complaint is slightly harder to address. Preservatives are in general a necessity of modern cheap food storage and distribution. One can certainly buy products without preservatives, but the price is higher for several very logical reasons (think supply and demand). Dyes and flavorings are more nebulous yet, as they are usually just listed as such on the label. Here I would have to put some faith in the FDA and the scientific process behind their oversight. Let me state right now that I don't believe the FDA or any other government agency is infallible or free from outside influence. But if you are one who thinks the FDA or the scientific process is there to serve only the interests of large companies and do nothing for the consumer, then we have a fundamental difference of opinion which likely can't be reconciled in the comment section of a blog. My point here being that if an additive is shown to be harmful the FDA will eventually move to ban it from inclusion in food, especially when science is accompanied by public outcry. Is this process slow and unnerving most times? Yes, but it's what we have. If studies can show that an additive is harmful, consumers have the freedom to not purchase products with those additives even if the FDA is slow to act.

(I should add here that there is a burden on the consumer to (1) give some degree of attention to scientific studies, and (2) be able to discern good from bad information. The difficulty is this is a VERY large can of worms of a different variety. I won't go into it here.)

Finally, the healthy aspect. This is the hardest for me to discuss, simply because I have not studied in any detail human physiology. I would not disagree with the statement that eating fresh vegetables, meat, etc. (fresh meaning non-pre-cooked) is healthier than the alternative. This is mainly because of some of the things that are put in pre-packaged foods to make them taste better, namely salts or sugars. It seems to be well documented that too much salt or too much sugar in ones diet is a bad thing. But this falls to the consumer to watch, and it is not necessarily the case that a product with the "natural" label frees one from having to consider what is in it.