Why ‘Natural’ *Is* Actually Better
Why the “natural” approach to health is not as misguided as some think…
(Forewarning: This article may be a little controversial)
There is a society-level push to distance humans from human nature.
Side note: I’m not making any statement here regarding the intentionality of that push; I’m just saying that it’s there.
Consider the claim commonly made by health influencers and media pundits that “just because something is ‘natural’ it doesn’t mean that it’s ‘better.’”
Then just look at the sheer number of articles written—and published in high-impact consumer media sites—on this topic, all sharing the near-identical title: Why ‘Natural’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Better’
(Look here, here, here, here, and… here—just to give you a few examples…)
These articles are usually written from the (frankly patronizing) viewpoint of experts providing lesser understood ‘pearls’ of scientific knowledge to the general ‘laity’—i.e., you, the reader.
In other words, you as the reader are supposed to come away from these articles feeling that you understand something better than the ‘uneducated’ masses around you who are still afflicted by the rampant appeal to nature fallacy—the mistaken notion that something is better just because it’s natural.
But I argue that—while much of what these articles say is in fact true and perhaps well-meaning and even perhaps transiently beneficial—the long-term impact of this message on humanity is emphatically detrimental.
Imagine the simplified scenario:
A fictional John Williams has been instructed to “clean up his diet” by his well-meaning (but nutritionally-illiterate) primary care doctor.
He goes to the grocery store and puts two items in his cart:
(1) A mango and (2) A can of Celsius Live Fit (the popular zero sugar energy drink).
As he approaches the checkout lane, remembering his doctor’s instructions, he picks up the two items, determined to purchase only one of them.
Which is ‘better’ for me?
A voice in his head—an old, instinctual type of voice—recognizes the mango and tells him that it’s the obvious choice. It’s natural, for heaven’s sake! Throw away that synthetic Celsius nonsense.
Whereas another, more ‘rational’ voice in his head (perhaps inspired by some recent reading), reminds him: “Natural isn’t always better, John! Don’t fall for the appeal to nature fallacy! You’re better than that! And just look at that Celsius—ZERO grams of sugar, versus that mango’s 45? You’d be crazy to go for that orange sugar bomb!”
He then looks at the ingredients list on the Celsius:
Carbonated Water
Citric Acid
Natural Flavors
Caffeine
Sucralose
Vegetable Juice for Color
and MetaPlus® Proprietary Blend: Taurine, Guarana Extract, Green Tea Leaf Extract (with EGCG), Glucuronolactone, Ginger Root Extract
Unable to understand 50% of the things on this list—and guided by his newly equipped anti-naturalistic-fallacy detector—he tosses the mango and checks out, Celsius proudly in hand.
(For a more absurd example, you can substitute a can of Monster Energy for the Celsius in the example above—a Monster Energy has roughly the same amount of sugar as a large mango. Frankly, I think John would still choose the Monster.).
Now, the problem is not really that John chose the Celsius over the mango, nor is it my goal to prove that energy drinks are always worse than mangos (though they very often are).
Rather, my goal is to present an exceedingly obvious (so much so that it’s nearly ridiculous) example of a situation where the “naturalistic fallacy” (term loosely used) is clearly beneficial—despite contrary claims that such is purely “the naïve reasoning of the uneducated masses.”
But first, let’s consider;
When knowing that “natural is not always better” actually is useful
Being primed with such skepticism about claims that something is good because it’s “natural” is useful in one key scenario:
Marketing.
In navigating the confusing mess that is health marketing, it absolutely is useful to be aware that many marketers will use appeals to nature inappropriately to get you to buy their products.
Many shampoos, for example, are advertised as “natural” but in fact contain harsh surfactants or controversial chemicals. The naïve consumer doesn’t know better, however, and chooses the shampoo for its “90% natural!” sticker and nature-invoking green-brown bottle.
So yes, skeptics correctly point out that “claims” that something is natural do not in fact make that thing natural.
But that’s just it: those claims were made inappropriately. In other words, those products were not actually natural, by any reasonable sense of this vague term. These examples therefore do nothing to disprove the idea that nature can be (and often is) better.
And that itself is an important point:
We’re saying that nature is often better. Not always.
I’m emphatically not claiming that natural is always better.
What I am claiming is that the appeal to nature is a useful heuristic for your health decision-making; i.e. it’s a good rule of thumb.
In other words, in the absence of other deciding factors or clear deal-breakers, considering whether or not something is “natural” is actually a useful way to decide between options.
Let’s consider an example:
Choosing an iron supplement based on “nature.”
Imagine that you discover that you have an iron deficiency (with or without anemia). Your labs come back, and:
Your ferritin is 7 ng/mL,
Your TIBC is 440 µg/dL,
Your serum iron is 30 µg/dL,
etc…
…altogether indicating that you have an iron deficiency.
You now need to supplement iron, and you have a few options:
ferrous gluconate,
ferrous sulfate,
ferrous fumarate,
or…
the “natural route”—i.e. fixing your iron by upping the iron in your diet via iron-rich foods like liver, red-meat, mussels, etc.
All else equal, the “natural route” is unquestionably the better option for the vast majority of people—if done right (and this is one of my gripes with the way iron deficiency is generally handled. You can generally get iron up much faster and safer with a targeted food-based plan).
Natural iron-rich foods like liver and beef:
Generally raise iron more quickly than synthetic forms if you get the quantity right,
Combine absolutely essential cofactors like copper and riboflavin to ensure that your iron is properly assimilated,
Are generally much safer for the digestive tract (synthetic forms are notorious for causing GI issues—gastritis, SIBO, etc.)
Reduce the oxidative effect of iron by steadying your rate and mechanics of absorption and combining antioxidants like vitamin A, etc.
Naturalistic “bias” was therefore a useful general frame of mind in this scenario.
The appeal to ignorance vs. the appeal to nature.
Let’s go back to the mango.
What makes the 45 grams of sugar in a mango better than the roughly 45 in a can of Monster? Or, say, a bottle of some Sports Drink™?
How would we actually make this determination? Mango vs Sports Drink?
It would be tempting to do so by juxtaposing the nutrition facts labels:
The Sports Drink has
40 grams of sugar
No fat or protein
Some potassium
Some sodium
Some vitamin C and B vitamins.
Whereas the mango has
45 grams of sugar
5 grams of fiber
1 gram of fat
2 grams protein
Some potassium
Some vitamin C.
And that’s it. That’s all a mango is: an orange, tasty packet of sugar, fiber, some minerals, and vitamin C—pretty similar to the Sports Drink (plus fiber).
And that’s just the problem: the modern health sphere considers foods purely on their atomistic, itemized, nutritional makeup. It doesn’t consider that there could possibly be more to a mango that we—quite simply—don’t know.
It’s an obvious absurdity—equating a mango and a sports drink—but (while they would never claim it) that is simply the natural outcome of the modern theoretical approach to health and nutrition. And it all comes down to an unwitting Appeal to Ignorance.
In other words, such people implicitly claim that because we do not know something exists, it must therefore not exist at all (this mistake—related to the broader concept of Epistemic Closure—is at the very heart of so much that is wrong with the modern world).
Because we think we understand the nutritional content of a mango, we narrow our focus to purely those known elements of that mango—whereas what a mango is—really and essentially—actually far exceeds these few paltry facts that we’ve pieced together.
The Appeal to Nature is useful—all else equal—because it does not discount these unknown elements; rather, it subsumes their consideration under the broader natural vs unnatural decision-making process.
“Natural”: Too vague a term to be of benefit?
Modern medicine considers the term “natural” to be too hopelessly vague to ever be of any practical benefit. Whether something is “natural” or not is completely impossible to determine, according to them, because there’s really no basis to decide.
For these people, the 45 grams of “added sugar” in a can of Monster are just as natural as the 45 grams of sugar in a mango, because what actually makes something natural in the first place, right?
This type of relativistic mindset is incredibly dangerous, for it is exactly that mindset that would do away with similarly “vague” concepts of wholesomeness, wellbeing, truth, and even right and wrong. A normative judgment will have to be made eventually, and elements of inherent, instinctual human reason must have some bearing on this judgement—otherwise we throw away our decision-making framework entirely.
Bandage vs. Cure
In reality, the issue with “nature” strikes at the core of the issue with modern medicine.
Modern medicine appears to be indelibly focused on “alleviation” rather than “cure.” Modern medicine has become so microscopically, myopically hyper-focused on branch physiological phenomena that it has almost entirely forgotten the very goal of medicine:
Healing.
The idea that “nature” is not a useful way to help judge the “goodness” of something is unfortunately drawn from modern medicine’s refusal to incorporate human nature into its decision making at all. Nay—even worse—it refuses to even consider that human nature exists.
If there is such a thing as human nature—some essential, inherent element to our being, deep within us, that defines us as a species distinct from all else around us—then we simply must seek to incorporate an understanding of that thing into our health decisions, for good health is ultimately produced by feeding that nature with what it needs, not with what you want.
That’s what “cure” is all about.
If, on the other hand, human nature is simply an artificial construct of our order-seeking human minds, then cure is simply off the table, for then we become helplessly focused on the end-products of our disordered bodies—the aches, pains, cuts, and bruises—and we direct all our efforts towards bandaging up what we have no means of truly curing because we no longer know what that thing even is.
A note from Dr. Malek:
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~Dr. Malek
Keep in mind that this is not official medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is established through this article or through any other information provided on this website.
