IT’S NATURAL, SO IT MUST BE HEALTHY

How many times have you heard this, or maybe even thought it yourself?  If you use a little common sense, you will realize that this is a huge conceptual error.  It is just plain wrong, but this belief is commonly held because it is continually drummed into us by ads that feed into a huge, very successful, marketing scam.  

A closely related fallacy is “I don’t want to put chemicals into my body.”  This, also, does not make sense, but is sure sounds logical if you don’t know better.  Technically speaking, all foods are composed of a wide assortment of chemicals produced by the cells of the plant or animal that made the food we are eating.

Let’s start with “natural.”  What does this mean? It depends who you talk to.  It means different things to different people, but most people seem to believe that whatever version of “natural” they talk about has to be somehow “good.”

Does it mean the food or supplement or folk remedy comes from a pristine environment?   If so, how can this be bad?  Well, plants grown in a pristine environment can contain toxins, just like those grown anywhere else.  Just think about wild mushrooms grown in the woods.  How natural, but how dangerous they can be.  And the toxins in the mushrooms are chemicals, but they occur naturally.

In the real world most of us live in, out foods come from farms, which might seem to be close to “natural.”   However, as we all know, almost all of the food produced on farms is grown with fertilizers of some sort, and usually insecticides.  This would seem to be a step away from nature. The issue of “Organic” agricultural techniques is a whole different post.

The next step for most farm grown foods is some degree of processing.   Yes, we do sometimes eat corn on the cob and the like, and we do eat fresh produce and fresh meat.  But most of our intake consists of things like bread, pasta, cheese, and the multitude of other foods that we do not really think of as “processed,” but which actually are altered from their native state. Does this make, for example, corn meal less natural than corn on the cob?  That depends on your definitions.

This morning, for example, I was eating some Greek yogurt and looked at the label.  They proudly boasted of“all-natural ingredients.”  In addition to the obvious milk and fruit, these included cane sugar and fruit pectin.    Should we consider these as natural ingredients, or are they processed natural ingredients, or should we even consider them to be chemicals? 

Let us look at how “pure cane sugar” is actually made.    The harvested cane is obviously a natural product, but not very usable.  The problem is that the sucrose is inside the cells of the cane plant, surrounded by cell walls filled with indigestible cellulose.  You have to get the sucrose out to use it. To do this, the cane is put through a series of rollers in a crushing machine.  The resulting juice contains many impurities including particles and salts.   The juice is then treated with calcium hydroxide and phosphoric acid to flocculate it and remove the particles and impurities. 

We still have a liquid juice.  This is put through a filter, typically activated carbon, which also traps some of the impurities that discolor the sugar.  It is then sent through a chain of vacuum processors that create a supersaturated solution, filled with crystals.  This is then put through a centrifuge to remove the crystals, which need to be dried by heating in a rotary dryer and then put in a cool air blow drier. In some cases, an additional bleaching chemical is added for better color. 

So, I ask you, is pure cane sugar really what you would consider natural?  Or is it a chemical that came from what is really a chemical plant that starts with a natural product and adds other chemicals to get the nice white crystals we all enjoy?  It all depends on your definitions, and, in the end, how much does it really matter? 

As for the “natural” fruit pectin, I will not go through the entire process.  Suffice it to say, this “natural” product begins with citrus peels, the apple pomace left after juicing, and the like.  These are hardly what any of us would call a food.  This unappetizing mass is treated in what is really another chemical plant with hot acids to change the chemical composition of the molecules, alcohol, and often ammonium hydroxide and calcium salts or organic acids.   This sounds like a “chemical” to me, but it is often referred to as “natural” and it is frequently used in foods that have nutritional contents that are really very good for the body.  Its real function is to help give the nutritious components a pleasing structure and taste that entices us to eat them.

 One final example:   Vitamin C.  Yes, this occurs in many plants, most notably the citrus fruits.  However, the Vitamin C in the tablets you may take does not come from fruit.  Vitamin C, which is known chemically as L-Ascorbic acid, is produced in chemical plants from d-sorbitol, which is a sugar alcohol.   This is processed with several chemical steps and treated with two different types of bacteria to produce commercial Vitamin C.  I think we would all classify this as a chemical, but the result is exactly the same molecule we can get from our orange juice, which we would call “natural.”     

The bottom line, I think, would be that what really matters is not whether the substance you eat is natural, processed, or a chemical.  What matters is what it does to your body, which is a totally different question. 

If the substance does something good for your body, who cares if some people would define it as unnatural or a chemical.  If the substance is harmful, being “natural” will not protect you.

Real Common Sense.