Natural Foods: What is Natural and What is Not – One Simple Test

What is natural and best for humans to eat is what we evolved with. You don’t get any longer or more reliable testing than that. Coming right after that are foods that we have eaten for many generations. Foods that are new to us are unnatural. Simple, right?

For example, genetically modified foods (GMO) may be doubleplusgood for you, or they may not, but eating them is still more risky than foods we have been eating for thousands of years.

Similarly, it is no surprise that “sugary soft drinks [are] linked to pancreatic cancer,” because they are hardly natural. We began drinking “sugary soft drinks” only fairly recently, so we should expect the side effects of doing so to select for those people who can handle the drinks better. Of course, this may take thousands of years, and in the meantime many of us will be selected out earlier than we otherwise would have gone.

This is one reason the European Union favours the precautionary principle, which states that the burden of proof for the safety of any new product is on the producer. The American government favours corporate interests and so the burden is on the consumer. The United States allows new products and chemicals to be ‘tested’ on the American people, and even passes legislation so Americans won’t know what’s in their food, so they won’t know they’re test animals.

Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) is a perfect example; Monsanto developed and promoted it as a way to increase milk production in cows despite their own very limited tests showing BGH caused problems in the cows and test animals is was given to. Monsanto then ‘arranged’ to have the U.S. government approve BGH and the Canadian government very nearly approve it, successfully pressured Fox News to keep a story about the safety of BGH off the air (getting two reporters fired in the process), and continues to lobby to make it illegal in some states to label milk as having come from cows given BGH. (As an aside, it was this same incident that resulted in the court agreeing that “Fox had no legal requirement to report the truth in a news story.” This same problem exists in Canada, where CBC’s The National Newhour’s Executive Producer informed me that “…it is not the CBC’s obligation to determine what is ‘truth’.”)

I digress. Anyway, claims can be made that certain new chemicals, foods, vitamins, and so on and so forth are an improvement on Nature’s attempts, but the proof is in our long-term health only – and that may take generations to be determined for those items that cause genetic defects. In the meantime, it makes sense to stick with “natural” foods.

What is Natural?

Natural is what we have evolved with. This applies not only to new foods and chemicals, but to age-old ones used in new ways. Steroids occur naturally in the human body; injecting or popping pills containing steroids is not new and can be dangerous. The previously mentioned BGH also occurs naturally, but stuffing cows with ‘extra,’ meaning more than their bodies make naturally, is new and therefore may have unintended and unpleasant consequences.

Milk is ‘natural,’ but yet many people cannot, or at least should not, be drinking it because they are lactose intolerant; they lack a necessary enzyme: “…among Asian populations it is almost 100%, among American Indians it is 80%, and among blacks it is 70%; however, among American Caucasians the prevalence of lactase deficiency is only 20%.” Milk is unnatural for these people, likely because people from these cultures or regions do not have a long history of drinking milk. To declare that “milk does a body good” is false for many people.

Organic foods are natural in the sense that humans have grown crops for eons without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The usual comeback from supporters of industrial agriculture is that the crops don’t care whether their nitrogen comes from natural gas or from horse manure, it’s still nitrogen. Again, this may or may not be true. But certainly the health of the soil degrades badly when nitrogen-based fertilizers are used, and plants get many other things beside nitrogen from that soil. So given the choice, I would prefer to eat organically-grown foods so I know they contain whatever they’re ’supposed to.’

Microwaving foods for any reason is not natural, although I do it anyway on occasion. Microwave popcorn is about as far from natural as you can get without eating plastic directly; I still do that once-in-awhile, too. (While moderation is also normally good, there is no guarantee that even one instance of an unnatural event will not be fatal or harmful.)

Non-food Unnaturalness

Plastic is simply not natural, but humans have been wearing clothes made of cotton and other ‘natural’ fibres since we learned to weave. Given my druthers, I go for the natural fibres, untreated with wrinkle and stain-resistant chemicals, when I buy clothes. It’s probably not a big deal, but why take chances? And then I also help all the people involved in the production of the clothes, from farmers to factory workers, who don’t have to work with those chemicals.

New houses are often a stew of chemicals like formaldehyde, and that “new car smell” is carcinogenic. When I build my next and last house, it will be of a ‘natural’ material that we have been in close contact with for more generations than I can count. Highly allergic people often have to live in houses like this, and while thankfully nobody in my family has severe allergies, asthma, or chemical sensitivities, I can’t see where my body having to deal with these foreign substances day-in-and-day-out is healthier than not having to.

What to Eat?

Ultimately, what is natural is what we ‘grew up with’ as a species. We have been eating organic foods in season until very recently, so it’s a safe bet that organically-grown foods are the healthiest for us. If you come from a part of the world that has been vegetarian since before anyone can remember, then eating animal products is likely to cause you problems. If you eat anything and it consistently causes stomach upset or other problems – stop eating it. It’s not really that complicated.

Resources for this post

The first (from left-to-right) is Michael Pollan’s classic on food and whence it came. In the course of his research, for example, he discovered that 40% of American foods contain corn in one form or another. That’s not natural.

Second is the result of an investigation by a food journalist and chef into which foods, regardless of how grown, were best for personal and planetary health.

Third is the now popular movie Food Inc, and “examines the costs of putting value and convenience over nutrition and environmental impact.” It is well-worth watching.

The final book is available for pre-order and is due out in May (in English; it came out in French last year). The World According to Monsanto is a thorough investigation of one of the most evil corporations on the planet, exposing how their pursuit of profit comes well before anything else, including your health or that of farmers or the planet.