Is Natural always Good?

One very common claim when it comes to discussions about diets is that more natural foods or compounds are healthier for humans. Be it wholegrain bread, which is argued to be closer to the simple wheat corn and thus nature compared to white bread or natural sugar, which is any sugar that is naturally contained in for example fruits or dairy, being far better than processed sugar such as corn syrup or cane sugar.

The claim is especially common in marketing of “health-conscious” foods, that appeal to their naturality as a way of conveying how healthy the supposedly are, after all, if it exists in nature, it can’t be bad.

The problem with this argument is that it simply appeals to emotions instead of actually providing any insight into the health effects of foods. It uses both the human desire for nature as well as the widespread acceptance to processed foods as unhealthy.

Simply put the claim is that, since processed foods are bad, their opposites, the natural foods, must be good.

But fact is that just isn’t true. On one hand, very few foods we eat today, even those labelled “natural”, are both unprocessed and truly natural. All bread and pasta we consume is processed (1, 2). Tofu and Sauerkraut are fermented. Even vegetables and fruits, which are often eaten raw or merely cooked, are far from those that would normally be found in the wild, unaffected by humans, and have instead been cultured to fit the human desires since the agricultural revolution. Fact is that, excepting pockets of non-agricultural tribal populations, it has been a long time since humans ate truly natural foods that had grown without human meddling.

In addition to this, even if we were eating completely natural foods, it wouldn’t necessarily make them healthy. There are plenty of natural things that are extremely unhealthy to humans. For example, if not processed properly, eating pufferfish can easily be deadly (3).

Of course, this doesn’t mean processed foods are great. Rather, the point I am making is that healthy foods can be both processed or unprocessed, natural or influenced by humans. And the same goes for unhealthy foods.

What’s important when considering a foods health effect isn’t whether it was peeled or cooked or cured of fermented or pickled, but instead what the food contains and how our bodies deal with it.

So be careful. Focusing on labels such as “unprocessed” or “natural” in pursuit of greater dietary health might have the exact opposite effect.

1. The food classification and description system FoodEx2 (revision 2), European Food Safety Authority; https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.2903/sp.efsa.2015.EN-804

2. Guidance document describing the food categories in Part E of Annex II to Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 on Food Additives; https://food.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-12/fs_food-improvement-agents_guidance_1333-2008_annex-2.pdf

3. Al Dhuhaibat, Z.K., and Zarzour, T. Tetrodotoxin Poisoning Due to Pufferfish Ingestion in the United Arab Emirates.