Natural Nonsense

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m traveling this weekend for a concert double-header, so I offer this bit from 2015. Given RFK’s antics as head of the FDA, it seems worth a revisit. No paywall today - enjoy!

A friend and former employee who has gone all-in on healthy living and all things natural has been sharing a variety of links and news stories with me of late - stories decrying GMO foods, Big Pharma, chemotherapy and Monsanto as the greatest evils of modern life and touting all things natural as the true path to wellness. Setting aside the lunacy of opposition to GMOs (there are mountains of studies finding GMOs safe and beneficial, and they’ve benefited billions of people around the world), there’s this natural is Good notion that just doesn’t make sense to me.

Why is natural better? Humans have spent millennia trying to do better than natural. Hybridizing plants (aka GMO), cross-breeding livestock and work animals (aka GMO), developing medicines, antibiotics, vaccines and the like that go beyond “medicine man” herbs and remedies, inventing artificial fibers for clothing that outperform natural fibers, converting crude oil into more useful products, refining ores into metals, building machines to make the labor of men more productive - all these and more are efforts by humans to do better than natural. Even a bicycle, that magnificent multiplier of human effort for the purposes of transportation, is not natural. Wheels are not natural.

Arsenic, mercury and lead are natural. Polio, diphtheria, typhus, the bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria - all natural. You can easily be infected with giardia or amoebic dysentery by drinking from a stream. Hippos, lions, tigers, great white sharks, crocodiles, venomous snakes, scorpions, jellyfish - all natural, all will happily kill you.

Natural remedies, part of a category called alternative medicine, seems to me to be more about marketing and providing false hope in the expectation of making a buck than about actually helping people. Someone succinctly defined alternative medicine as “stuff that doesn’t work” (when alternative medicine does work, it becomes “medicine”). Its advocates dismiss such claims as part of a Big Medicine and Big Pharma plot to prevent use of products they can’t make money on without ever considering the possibility that the hawkers of natural remedies are themselves looking to make money. In olden days, peddlers of “snake oil,” a product that might be anything from mineral oil mixed with red pepper, turpentine, and camphor to opium dissolved in alcohol, would travel from town to town, hawking their product as a cure-all… and moving on before people realized it didn’t work. Nowadays, late night television and local radio are full of ads hawking all-natural products that promise things like cleansing the colon, detoxifying the body and helping (not curing) certain ailments. It’s suggested that these remedies aren’t in the mainstream because the FDA (who is in the pockets of Big Pharma) has been paid off not to approve them, or that the big companies can’t make money off them, but there’s obviously a ton of money being made by someone.

Natural farming (i.e. farming that restricts the use of technology to some arbitrary level below the most efficient) requires more land and produces less yield than more technological farming. Less yield translates to more land required and more effort required. Apart from the cost factor, that extra land becomes land that can’t be allowed to go natural, i.e. return to a wild state.

Natural and organic are not judged by any consistent set of rules or definitions, and in some cases are indistinguishable from their presumably unnatural counterparts. People, however, are demonstrably wiling to pay more and to believe that these products are better, simply because they consider the terms inherently good. The extra money they pay is money that can’t be used for other things that might benefit their lives or improve their lifestyles. In and of itself, this isn’t something to worry about. People spend money on stupid things all the time. But, as a cultural movement, this obsession with natural does real harm to others. Apart from the terrible toll that the anti-GMO movement takes on the third world, the natural movement pressures big companies to alter their products and increase their costs simply to satisfy an often-specious consumer belief.

A writer/blogger/activist who calls herself the “Food Babe” has built a name and a following on, as some put it, “fear mongering.” In this, she has apparently taken a page from the playbook of the Center For Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the self-styled “food police” who have figured out that sound bites make for good marketing. CSPI came up with, among other things, the phrase “heart attack on a plate” to describe fettuccine alfredo. The Food Babe (real name, Vani Hari) has reportedly led campaigns against some commonly used additives by quoting their chemical names to her followers with an implication that, since the names are long and hard to pronounce, they must be bad. She noted that a common bread additive was also used in yoga mats, a correlation that certainly sounds scary. But, without any scientific study showing that additive is bad for you, is that correlation a legitimate cause for concern? Food Babe’s correlation reportedly led Subway to announce it’s not going to use that additive any more. She also reportedly pressured brewers to reveal the ingredients in their beers, and when one turned out to be propylene glycol alginate, she noted that propylene glycol is used in antifreeze. The former, however, is not the latter. More on all that here.

One meme that’s been floating around for a while centers on the all-curative properties of a honey-cinnamon mix. While the foodstuffs have a number of health benefits (as do many others), there are claims that this mixture has cured cancer and influenza. Such claims are the issue, because they might lead sick people to eschew modern medicine in favor of myth and folklore. Over-emphasis on the natural aspect of things that are good for you can create distrust in modern science and technology and lead to tragic outcomes.

Does all this mean natural is worse? Not necessarily. Honey and cinnamon are probably good for you, and it’s better to smear that instead of margarine on your toast. As with any broad-brush assertion, the devil is always in the details, and there are examples that can point in many directions. What it does mean is that natural is an empty term, one that’s filled in many different ways by many different people. Practically speaking, it should be recognized as a marketing scheme above all else. As with all such, a healthy dose of skepticism and a look the motives of the originators is proper and prudent.

It’s understandable that people fear that which they don’t understand, and as technology progresses, more people don’t understand more of the things they encounter in daily life. It also seems reasonable that many people who are overwhelmed by the complexity of the modern world embrace the idea that things were better when things were simpler. Viewing those days typically happens through the proverbial rose-colored glasses, and the idealized and fictionalized simple life of yore is usually scrubbed of all the nasty diseases that killed people, of the enormously greater effort it took to produce a certain amount of food, of the fact that a simple scratch could kill you, of the relative difficulty and misery level of life back then, and of all the things that were hard and that took their toll on humanity. Natural is also a dream that things can be improved further without the effort that it has taken to improve them thus far, as if going backwards is the preferred way to move forward. Natural, as a stand-alone and self-contained idea, is nonsense.