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Natural Born Shillers
There’s nothing so great about being all
natural.
– May 5, 2005
While grocery shopping recently, I noticed that the chicken I was buying was cleanly wrapped in plastic adorned with a label that informed me the chicken was "all natural," and that it was not made from any artificial ingredients. I was happy to learn that I was not buying an artificial chicken. Chances are your medicine cabinet, refrigerator, bathroom and cupboard shelves are also filled with products whose labels comfortingly reassure that they are "all natural" and free from anything "artificial." Marketing experts go to great lengths to ensure their strategies reflect the attitudes of their customers, and from a marketing point of view, natural = good, artificial = bad.
But like most marketing schemes, there is little reality to the image, and a savvy consumer would be wise to adopt a skeptical attitude toward any and all such claims. Like most successful marketing ploys, the "natural" mythology reflects little more than human psychology.
Humans are hardwired for the emotion of disgust, an evolutionary adaptation meant to motivate us to avoid poisons and all things likely to be putrid or contaminated. This primitive emotion finds specific manifestations in each particular culture. Americans, for example, are obsessed with sanitation. We like our food vacuum sealed in clear plastic. And, of late, we also like our products to be anointed with the virtue of being natural. We are programmed to respond to ingesting anything artificial as if it were motor oil.
Let's take a peak under the hood of this sales pitch. First, the word "natural," as it is used in marketing, has no clear definition. It could be used to mean that the product is grown rather than manufactured, or that it is manufactured but from raw materials which occur in nature. There is also a fuzzy line between "grown" and "made." How much processing can a grown substance undergo and still remain "natural?" What if an apple is broken down into its constituent parts? What if they are mixed with other substances, or altered slightly? One company even went to the ultimate absurd extreme of claiming that its product was natural because the atoms and elements in them were naturally occurring. By such a broad definition, plastic is natural.
But even if we take a more reasonable definition of "natural," why should we care? The marketing implication is that products that are natural are magically safe and non-toxic. But we have no reason to assume that a natural substance is not harmful to humans, most are. Arsenic, alkaloids, venoms and countless other plant and animal products are deadly poisons. I would not recommend walking into your backyard and eating a random plant, unless you want to get sick. Nature does not care about humans.
Recently, "natural" has come to mean not only "safe" but also "medicinally effective." The laws in this country (specifically the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994) are now such that the mere label of "natural" allows a company to make broad health claims about its product without the pesky burden of doing research or providing any evidence. They don't even have to demonstrate basic safety.
In fairness, there is one advantage to some substances that are natural,
namely that many of them have been around for a long time. Humans therefore
have extensive experience with them, so we have a pretty good idea how safe
they are (although this is no guarantee of safety either). Newly invented
substances, on the other hand, are unknowns. It is therefore only right that we
are more cautious regarding such substances and subject them to careful
research before allowing them into the environment or onto store shelves. In
fact, over the last century there have been a number of mishaps with new
substances, such as the infamous thalidomide, a nausea drug given to pregnant
women in
In the final analysis, the word "natural" when applied to products should mean nothing to you, except that the marketer is hoping to lull you with an attractive label. You should know what is actually in the products you buy (especially the food you eat and pills you take) and what reliable scientific evidence has to say about their safety and the veracity of any claims made about them. Our laws should reflect this rational approach. We should abandon the false dichotomy between "natural" and "artificial" as a substitute for evidence and careful analysis.
Even still, I cannot help but be glad I never bought any artificial chickens.
Letters and Dr. Novella’s Responses