What does 'natural' mean? Some claims on food packages may be misleading

Vegetarian Times, Sept, 2004 by Alan Pell Crawford

Admit it. If, right now, you could bite down on a crispy, crunchy potato chip that was "natural" and therefore good for you, you'd do it, right?

Thought so. Makers of potato chips--and corn chips, pancake mixes, frozen waffles, frosted breakfast cereals, ice cream and other taste tempters--think so too. That's why the word "natural" appears so frequently on food packages these days. Marketing experts know that, for many consumers, natural equals healthful, and that healthful sells.

In fact, the word "natural" on a food package may mean next to nothing because--unlike "organic"--"natural" has no meaning in law or regulation. For these reasons, the use of "natural" on food products all too often distracts attention from more important considerations.

"Natural" may even be misleading if it implies that a product is free of chemical additives (often not the case) or that competitors' products are "unnatural and therefore bad for you.

Some additives, such as vitamins and minerals, are beneficial, making it easier to get certain nutrients--think of fortifying OJ with calcium. And preservatives keep foods from spoiling, which is good, as long as the preservatives themselves are not harmful or exist in too great quantity. Salt, for example, is a preservative.

"People have come to think that 'natural' is synonymous with healthful, which isn't necessarily true," says Melina Beth Jampolis, MD, a San Francisco-based member of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians--specialists in treating obesity. "Salt is natural, but too much of it is bad for you."

On the other hand, some forms of "unnatural" processing, such as pasteurizing milk to kill bacteria, yield huge health benefits.

Poetic License

"Obviously, there is a lot of poetic license taken with the way foods are advertised," Jampolis adds. In fact, advertisers can make virtually any claim they want about how natural their products are, with two exceptions.

The first is when the word is used in connection with flavors. In that case, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines a natural flavor as one that is derived "from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf" or similar plant (or even animal) material.

The second exception, irrelevant to vegetarians, involves the use of the word "natural" in meat and poultry products. The US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service allows the word to be used on minimally processed meat and poultry products with no artificial ingredients or added colors.

"Most people think natural is good and artificial is bad, but nutritionally, that's also not always the case," says Robert Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, food columnist for The Washington Post and author of What Einstein Told His Cook." Kitchen Science Explained.

Almost all foods today are processed in some way, and unless you are able to buy exclusively from a farmers' market or grow your own fruits and vegetables, much of what you eat has seen the inside of a lab, factory or high-tech warehouse. Food science has become so sophisticated that it can be difficult to know where natural ends and unnatural begins.

Classic Example

Tomatoes are the classic example. "They are routinely picked green and then gassed with ethylene, a plant hormone that encourages them to ripen and become red," Wolke says. "This can be seen as an artificial process done to speed up the ripening that ordinarily would take place anyway. And the chemical content of the tomato doesn't change as a result, so is it natural or not? That's impossible to say." The flavor, of course, is another matter.

Even to produce what the FDA would consider a natural flavor, Wolke explains, takes a great deal of work in a lab or factory. "You can process almonds to extract almond flavor, which is benzaldehyde. Or you can manufacture benzaldehyde in a lab with much less effort. But the chemical compound you end up with in both cases is identical, so it is difficult to say what makes the 'artificial' almond flavor 'unnatural.'"

Most people think they know what "natural" means, however, and they shop accordingly. A January 2002 study by the Washington, DC-based National Consumers League (NCL) found that 76 percent of those surveyed believed that foods with "natural" on the package should contain at least 90 percent natural ingredients; 80 percent said "natural" products were "good for them." However, as NCL President Linda Golodner said when the study was released, "products with the 'natural' labeling are not required by law to contain only natural ingredients."

Unsuspecting Consumers

When unscrupulous marketers exploit such expectations, they manipulate unsuspecting health-conscious consumers, making it more difficult for them to make intelligent choices among products.

These marketers also cast doubt on the well-founded claims made by the hundreds of food companies, most rather small, whose commitment to using natural ingredients is genuine. That is unfortunate because many of their products come about as close as possible to what you'd pick from a backyard garden, find at a roadside farm stand or--with flour and other grain-based products--buy at a water-powered gristmill.