‘Natural’ Foods Might Not Be Better For You

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The majority of adults today have a health conscience and seek out products in grocery stores with “natural” food labels. But what does “natural” actually mean to individual consumers, the people marketing the food options and the regulative bodies that decide how food is made and advertised? It turns out that question is surprisingly difficult to answer.

James Hamblin, the senior health editor at The Atlantic and host of “If Our Bodies Could Talk,” discussed the natural food conundrum on one of the show’s segments, focusing specifically on natural versus conventional peanut butter options.

“Is natural? better?” he asks. “What does it even mean? There’s nothing natural about farming peanuts and crushing them up and putting them into a jar and shipping them around the world… unless there is. Maybe I misunderstand nature.”

With peanut butter, most people typically share similar expectations of what natural would mean — just peanuts and salt, no added sugar or hydrogenated oils. But with other “health” foods on supermarket shelves, that definition can get incredibly obscure, even for the team responsible for regulating it.

“The FDA is trying now to define it, but they’re having a real hard time and I don’t think they’re going to be able to,” says Hamblin in the video. The FDA website even directly states that it has yet to develop a definition of what “natural” means when it comes to food sales.

Yet we still buy into it… literally. Americans spend approximately $40 billion a year on products that are labeled “all natural” even though we don’t fully know what that means. Instead, our best bet is to stick to reading ingredient labels and weeding out the culprits that boast the use of added colors, artificial flavors, synthetic substances and other nasty things we probably can’t pronounce.

Keep buying “natural” everything if it helps you sleep better at night, but remember to ask yourself what added benefit you think you’re getting depending on the product you’re picking up. Otherwise, it’s hard to justify that increasingly high grocery bill.