Why Natural Isn't Always Healthier

When it comes to nutrition, there’s an assumption that natural is always healthier. While there is value in eating more fresh, minimally processed food, the idea that natural is superior is also at the heart of some of the most pernicious diet and health misinformation. This blog post explores the nuance behind the idea of natural.

Over the past few months, I’ve gotten more food and nutrition questions from friends and family members than ever before in my career as a dietitian. Seed oils, red dye, ultraprocessed foods, raw milk - the sheer amount of nutrition information (mostly mis and disinformation) proliferating on social media and podcasts right now is pretty overwhelming, even for someone with a degree in this stuff. I’ve spent countless hours going back and reviewing research on topics just to be able to counter all the inaccurate information out there. As a sidebar, it’s pretty depressing thinking about how much time us healthcare workers have been spending combatting disinformation when we could be learning, growing our skills, and communicating more helpful nutrition and health information.

Alas, this is the information environment we’re in right now, and with the current restrictions on health communication and limits on fact checking on social media, I don’t see it getting much better. I’ve got some content planned for both here and on instagram to address some of these myths, but until then, I wanted to talk about the core assumption behind most of the nutrition myths currently going around - the idea that “natural” is always healthier, especially when it comes to food.

I really understand why the idea that natural is healthier is so appealing - it’s a trap I personally fell into at the height of the clean eating craze. Like all of the most pernicious diet myths, there’s a kernel of truth to the idea that natural is healthier. There’s buckets of research showing that eating a diet rich in fresh, whole foods is beneficial. There’s also truth to the fact that our food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries have some pretty icky parts to them to say the least! These truths create a vibe that makes us want to believe anything that grounded in the idea that natural is healthier. It makes people want to believe things like red dye causing cancer or seed oils being inflammatory, even when presented with evidence that debunks. These things feel true, even if they aren’t.

However, just because natural can be healthier, doesn’t mean what’s natural is categorically good and what’s unnatural is categorically bad. Not only that, but how do we define what’s natural in the first place?

What does “natural” mean?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, natural is defined as “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.” At first glance that seems pretty cut and dry, but when you try to apply that definition to specific examples, it gets fuzzy.

Everything comes from nature somewhere down the line. Remember the good ‘ole periodic table? The elements that are the building blocks for every single thing on this planet were all naturally existing somewhere on this earth! So what’s the line that divides natural from unnatural, especially in a world that’s been crafted through tens of thousands of years of human intervention?

*As I often remind my clients, processed foods (like the msg and sauce I added to this veggie and tofu stir fry) make eating fresh, whole foods easier and tastier. And yes,* *msg is totally safe!*

Take the example of fluoride, a mineral currently in the news because some are claiming it lowers IQ and causes cancer (spoiler: it doesn’t). Unfortunately, these claims are leading some towns to stop fluoridating their public water supply, a move that will have a huge impact on lower income people who don’t have access to dental care. While these claims are thoroughly debunked and water fluoridation is considered one of the biggest modern public health successes (DYK that dental caries have historically been one of the leading causes of death?), it’s easy the believe fluoridation is bad because it feels unnatural to pump our water supply full of something with a hard to spell name (I’ve been autocorrected 4 times already typing this paragraph - the u before o gets me every time). And yet, fluoride is a mineral, one that is naturally found in water in higher or lower concentrations depending on where someone lives. The benefits of fluoride for dental health were discovered after noticing the low rates of dental caries around CO Springs, an area that had much higher levels of fluoride in their drinking water than what’s added to public drinking water today. So why is fluoride in drinking water thought of as unnatural when it’s already present, and in high levels in some places? Many people, including the same people who are pushing the fluoride myth, are more than happy to supplement nutrients they aren’t getting enough of - how is adding fluoride to drinking water any different? How is fluoridation any less natural than adding a pinch of salt to water?

Another issue with categorizing natural: what we think of as natural is always in relationship to where we are in history - not to mention our geographic location. Things we think of as natural today would look positively futuristic to people from earlier times, Just think, once upon a time cooking food was a new invention, an “unnatural” shift in food preparation. And yet it helped us unlock and digest more of the nutrients in food, made eating a lot safer, and may have even helped us evolve to have bigger brains!

You might be reading this and thinking “oh come on Rachael, you know what we mean when we talk about natural food.” Maybe?? I certainly know most people consider fresh, one-ingredient foods to be natural, and I agree that in an ideal world, these would be the backbone of a healthy eating pattern. But beyond that it gets confusing.

The NOVA food classification system was designed to categorize foods based on degree of processing, and is most commonly cited in determining what counts as an “ultra-processed” food. There are a lot of inconsistencies because the categorization system is super arbitrary. It uses the totally random number of 5 ingredients as a cutoff, and the presence of certain additives/ingredients that are completely safe can push foods into a higher level of processing. Many foods categorized as ultra-processed are also valuable sources of nutrition, at least, for those of us without a private chef. This is especially true for anyone with allergies or other medically necessary food restrictions. For example, many whole grain cereals, crackers, and breads that are accessible and kid-friendly sources of whole grain? Ultraprocessed. That tasty salad dressing that makes you actually want to eat a big bowl of veggies? Ultraprocessed. The gluten free snack foods that allow someone with celiac disease to actually, ya know, eat? Ultraprocessed.

This might seem silly, but there is real harm that is done, especially to lower income people who may not have the time or money to cook fresh, whole foods as often as they’d like, when we demonize ultra-processed foods. There’s a big difference in promoting more fresh foods versus demonizing foods with too many ingredients or an ingredient with a long name.

Not much “natural” about this meal of frozen cheesy chicken nuggets, frozen french fries and a salad kit, and that’s OK! We live in a world that’s far from natural, and sometimes getting yourself fed means embracing processed foods.

It’s also worth pointing out that many of the people who rail against processed foods live off (both nutritionally and via the affiliate links they profit from) foods that are technically ultra-processed. They just don’t think of them that way because the packaging is aesthetically appealing and you can buy them in Whole Foods. Does Athletic Greens grow on a tree? Is there a keto cereal farm? How many ingredients are in that protein and fiber enriched bar? Probably a bit more than 5!

Why natural isn’t always healthier

While natural can be healthier, there’s a lot of nuances there. How we define “healthier” is very personal, based on one’s individual goals, lifestyle, access to resources, genetics, health history, and more. That said, I think there’s some pretty clear and mostly agreed upon examples that break down the natural is healthier logical fallacy!

Sometimes things that are natural are healthier…

Air and water that’s free of pollution (or at least low in pollutants, because let’s be real, free of pollution is a pipe dream!)
A sleep cycle/circadian rhythm that’s semi-aligned with day/night cycles
Access to plenty of fresh, whole foods (and enough food!)
A lifestyle that allows for social connection, movement, and safety
Intact ecosystems

Sometimes they’re not…

Tobacco
Hurricanes, floods, drought, forest fires, tsunamis, etc.
Only eating locally (if you live in the vast majority of the world that does not support growing adequate amounts of food year round)
Using leeches as medical treatment (super natural - also yuck!)
Brain eating amoebas

And sometimes man-made is healthier…

Appropriately prescribed medications to treat or cure health conditions
Adaptive equipment, like wheelchairs, glasses/contact lenses, and hearing aids
Sleeping in a heated home on a comfortable mattress and not outside in the cold

The bottom line

“Just because there is value in nature doesn’t mean we should commune with it at all times, and castigate ourselves for times we don’t.” ~ Alan Levinovitz in Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science

This quote from Alan Levinovitz, a religious scholar who has extensively researched and written on wellness culture, perfectly summarizes my view on the value of natural when it comes to nutrition and health. Even if we can’t perfectly categorize and define what’s natural when it comes to food, there is value in natural as a concept when it comes to nutrition.

What one person thinks of as natural, another person might not. Some people might think of this bowl of rice, cucumber salad and spicy beef as natural, others might think of it as unnatural due to the white rice, processed sauces, and seed oils used in cooking.

And yet, we live in an environment that is anything but natural. For better or worse, there pretty much nothing in our lives that our ancient ancestors would recognize. Frankly, there’s not much in our lives that people 100 years ago would recognize! Even if we could agree on a definition of natural eating, and knew for a fact that it was the most nutritious way to eat, it wouldn’t be accessible for more than an extremely small number people. For better or worse, we don’t live in a world that makes it easy to only eat fresh, whole foods.

Historically speaking, our health as a species has been determined by our ability to adapt to our environment. Sometimes that’s meant embracing change and technology (think modern plumbing, antibiotics, and cooking food over fire). Other times, it’s meant resisting or slowing change and embracing what’s natural. When it comes to food, I don’t know exactly what that balance looks like, but I do know it’s different person to person, and the only way to figure out what that balance looks like for you is taking the idea that natural is always better off a pedestal.