“All-Natural!”
“No Artificial Colors or Flavors!"
“No Harsh Chemicals!”
…so reads the labels of many foods marketed towards your health and well-being. The implication, of course, is that natural food ingredients are inherently safer than artificial ingredients. Artificial ingredients are supposed to be bad for us. They are supposed to cause cancer, and headaches, and hyperactivity in kids, and depression, and unemployment, and poverty, and traffic jams, and Paris Hilton.
OK, maybe they’re not that bad, but you get the idea. Natural ingredients are supposed to be safer, and healthier. We eat an “all-natural” product and we feel good and confident that we are doing something healthy for us. Natural ingredients are supposed to make us glow and bring happy joyful faces to all of the world and an end to all suffering and make dogs and cats live together.
OK, again I’m exaggerating but I’m sure you get the point. Natural is better….right?
Right?
Here’s a list of some natural substances that people have consumed in the past.
Coumarin
Calamus Oil
Ephedra
What do these natural substances all have in common?
They have all been banned from the market by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for being unsafe for humans and are not legal as food ingredients.
Coumarin used to be found in many artificial vanilla flavorings until the FDA banned it in 1978. While coumarin was found in artificial vanilla, the substance itself is quite natural. It is a natural toxin found in many plants, particularly tonka beans and bison grass. Coumarin is moderately toxic to the liver and kidneys. In fact, it is used as a rat poison. It is also used to make the drug warfarin (Coumadin), an anticoagulant drug (it helps stop blood clots).
Calamus oil, which is a natural oil that comes from the Calamus plant, was banned as a food additive by the FDA in 1968. It was banned because it was found to be a carcinogen (a cancer causing agent) when ingested by mouth.
Ephedra, a natural herb used for weight loss, was banned by the FDA in 2004 because of accumulating evidence of adverse health effects and possible deaths due to the stimulant.
The point is that all of these products are “natural” products, yet are not safe to consume. There are many other things found in nature that are also not safe to consume. For example, aflatoxin is a naturally occurring toxin produced by a fungus. It is known to be toxic and carcinogenic in high amounts. All commercial peanut butter has minute quantities of aflatoxin, but not in amounts that are high enough to be harmful.
Ironically, some artificial food additives may in fact be safer than some natural food additives, simply because artificial additives must go through very stringent testing to be approved for use. For example, many of the artificial sweeteners on the market went through over 100 studies each to be approved. These studies covered everything from how the sweetener is metabolized by the body to whether it could cause cancer to what the effects on the reproductive system would be.
Stevioside, an extract of the natural herb stevia, is advertised as a natural alternative to artificial sweeteners.
However, stevioside has not gone through the same stringent testing that the artificial sweeteners have gone through. In fact, some (but not all) test-tube studies indicate stevioside may damage DNA. Some (but not all) studies indicate high doses may have adverse effects on the reproductive system. In fact, stevia has been historically used as a male contraceptive in Paraguay. I don’t know about you, but I’ll consume a well-tested artificial substance any day over a natural substance that might affect my sperm count!
Stevioside is not approved as a sweetener in the U.S., Europe, Australia, or New Zealand. Of course, some people think that there’s a big conspiracy between the artificial sweetener companies and the FDA to keep stevia from becoming an approved sweetener, but that’s the topic of another blog.
Also, what exactly is a “natural” ingredient? What separates “artificial” from “natural” ingredients? If you think about it, there really is no clear cut way to determine this. One way to define “natural” is any product that would appear on its own without human intervention. Based on this definition, stevioside is not a natural sweetener, since it requires human intervention to extract it from the stevia herb. Another way to define a “natural” product is one that is made from natural ingredients that exist on their own, but the product itself would not exist on its own without human intervention. By this definition, cake is a natural product. While cake does not exist on its own in nature, it is made from ingredients that do exist on their own (flour, sugar, eggs, etc.). However, by this definition, aspartame (Nutrasweet) is also a natural product. Aspartame is created by combining two amino acids, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, and methanol, all of which are found naturally in the foods we eat. Yet many people consider aspartame as “artificial.”
When it comes to flavorings, the FDA defines “natural flavor” as “the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.” Any other flavor added on top of that is considered artificial. However, flavors (artificial or natural) are made by scientists in a laboratory by blending either “natural” chemicals or “synthetic” chemicals to create the flavorings. So, again, the line between “artificial” and “natural” is not distinct. Gary Reineccius, a professor in Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, once said “The distinction in flavorings – natural versus artificial – comes from the source of these identical chemicals and may be likened to saying that an apple sold in a gas station is artificial and one sold from a fruit stand is natural. Artificial flavorings are simpler in composition and potentially safer because only safety-tested components are utilized….consumers pay a lot for natural flavorings. But these are in fact no better in quality, nor are they safer, than their cost-effective artificial counterparts.”
Also, if you look at an ingredient list, would you even be able to tell what was natural and what was artificial? Let’s take a bar of soap, for example.
The ingredients for this bar of soap might read:
“Olive oil, palm oil, coconut oil, water, sodium hydroxide”
If you saw this list of ingredients, you would think that this product is mostly natural. You then look at the ingredients for another bar of soap, and they read:
“Sodium olivate, sodium palmitate, sodium cocoate, glycerine”
Looking at this list, you might think that this product is mostly artificial. However, these are the exact same ingredients as in the other bar of soap!!!!! It’s like labeling something as “water”, or labeling something as “dihydrogen monoxide (H2O)”. They’re the same thing.
The take-home message is this: don’t assume that natural ingredients are inherently better than artificial ingredients in regards to health. Rather than worrying about whether an ingredient is natural or artificial, you should worry about its safety record and whether it’s been thoroughly tested. The line between what is artificial and what is natural is more like a fuzzy haze than a line anyway.