“Natural” Part 1: What Does It Really Mean and why Does It Matter? 

More than likely, your impression of the word “natural” is, at least in part, from the marketing words on the products you buy and the ads you see. It often conjures up images of quaint family farms, happy animals living freely on the land and healthy plants living in harmony with nature. What it fails to show is the reality of the modern food industry: multinational biotech firms, factory farm slaughterhouses and monoculture fields contaminated by synthetic pesticides and fertilizers as well as sterilized by glyphosate. 

If only logos were honest, wouldn’t that be a site?! Would you want to eat “tortured animal” nitrate hot dogs on inflammatory glyphosate dough conditioner buns with pesticide fertilizer GMO corn syrup insulin spiking ketchup? Not so appealing, eh? 

For a moment, we invite you to set faux “natural” marketing tactics aside, and dive into a more authentic understanding of the adjective “natural” as it applies to our food, body and home care products. In terms of the chemistry (we are referring to any kind of molecule and the chemical reactions they produce), synthetic means that something is made by human intelligence, in a lab or in a commercial production facility. These include pharmaceutical drugs, designer drugs, artificial flavors, colors and preservatives, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, research chemicals, poisons, fragrances, foaming agents, building materials, plastics, cleaning chemicals, dyes, textiles, etc. “Better living through chemistry” is in full swing, and we are constantly finding new ways to augment our reality through science and industry.

As the name implies, natural means that something is made by nature. Why would it be a better idea to stick to nature made chemistry when it comes to our food, and the chemicals that get in our bodies (like cleaning and body care products)? What’s so bad about all the amazing chemicals that scientists and industrial giants have created to benefit our lives? Why not just eat the regular food in the grocery store?  

When products we consume (eat, breathe or put on our skin) are made of molecules we have not evolved with, our bodies get confused and don’t know what to do with them. Our bodies either try to use them, which almost always backfires into a side effect, or they flag them as an invader or toxin, signaling an inflammatory response. What we are discovering more and more is a very clear pattern in which, for many reasons, synthetic chemicals are toxic even in low levels to the human body, causing multiple avenues of damage.

These may include endocrine disruption, which means a chemical interferes with normal hormone function, and it can even mimic a hormone, such as estrogen, leading to increased risk of estrogenic cancers. There are mountains of evidence that most synthetic chemicals, some definitely more than others, interfere with cellular and, thus, organ function. This means damage to tissues and functionality of the body, such as our liver, kidneys, gastrointestinal tract, skin, reproductive system and nervous system. 

We run into these questions a lot:

1. I don’t want to stress out about everything I eat. Isn’t that unhealthy?
2. Don’t I have organs to get rid of those tiny amounts of bad stuff and just keep the good stuff?

There’s a difference between beneficial stress that makes you stronger and toxic stress that tears you down faster than you can repair, leading to degenerative disease. Yes, we agree that stressing out about food purity or anything else can be unhealthy. We’re here to help you enjoy selecting the best food for your body. There’s no need for it to be stressful once you’re food marketing savvy. In fact, it can be downright fun and feel so good. We call that healthy hedonism.

Secondly, yes, you have cellular mechanisms and organ functions dedicated to taking in the good stuff and taking out the trash, but we are not evolved to deal with so many mental and physical stressors. Sure, we are adapted to remove plant toxins from our bodies, escape imminent danger and get stronger from the good stress of enjoyable exercise, but not to deal with the enormous chemical burden and malnutrition induced by processed foods and other toxic products.

For this reason, if we are reckless with what molecules and habits we choose in our daily lives, our cells will never be able to keep up. It’s like getting into metabolic debt. Our body lets us know we’re falling down on the self-care job via pain, low energy and unhappiness.

Before we proceed any further, let us be clear that we aren’t saying that there is no place or use for synthetic chemicals ever. It’s more a question of pervasiveness and context as well as ecological stewardship in the process. We want to clarify that we feel strongly, through our deep scientific understanding and our personal experiences healing ourselves, that when it comes to these chemicals interacting with your own biochemistry, it is wiser to keep it real so to speak. Synthetic molecules can cause all kinds of trouble; even low doses add up over time.

So, even though we may benefit from the use of some synthetic chemicals in limited contexts. We also want to be clear that for most human daily needs, there are almost always nature-made alternatives that work, often even better than their synthetic counterparts, such as in the world of food, self-care, household cleaning and even medicine.

We are also excited about newer generations of engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs who are finding non-toxic solutions for larger and larger industrial applications. Examples include using enzymes and bacteria to clean up plastic islands in the ocean, mushrooms instead of pesticides for termite control, or Tesla electric cars that, not only don’t emit toxic emissions, but clean the air outside the car. When we focus on working with, as opposed to against, nature, anything is possible!

We next need to explain the depth and beauty of where nature-made chemicals really come from, and just how unbelievably complex and amazing nature is, which is of course what you are. We will try to omit any jargon.

In nature, chemistry is made by life, in its myriad of forms. Molecules are made by plants, animals, fungi and microbes. Protein chains are coded for by genes, and if you read our last article on protein powder, you will remember that these proteins form enzymes that catalyze all of the chemistry that happens in living things. From single celled creatures smaller than a wavelength of light, all the way to the largest sea giants, all use some form of this molecular machinery to synthesize or repurpose chemistry to their own needs. Every generation honing this process through the reality of natural selection, and this has gone on for millions of years.

Since all life on this planet is intimately interconnected in what we call ecosystems, co-evolutionary relationships abound, especially among those who eat each other. The process of eating another life form in order to acquire its molecular machinery and chemical soup and being able to turn that into the chemistry you need to live is a very intimate and powerful thing. There is an intelligence in this process beyond our human intellectual grasp. Some would call it God, others just let it be reality or nature. Just because our collective scientific mind is only beginning to understand the vastness of nature, or what we are, does not mean that nature’s intelligence is thus limited. We don’t actually need to understand every chemical reaction in our body in order to benefit from the intelligence within our own DNA.

All we need to do is cultivate respect for the co-evolutionary relationships that we have written in our DNA. This means learning to enjoy eating the multitude of amazing foods that grow in accordance to nature’s rhythms. If you eat truly natural food, and let how you feel guide how much, when, and which ones you eat, you will be on your way to closing any nurture gaps you may have in this area.

Having both come from science backgrounds, we want to admit something to you. Researchers have become extremely advanced in their understanding of our molecular reality, so advanced that we now know just how little we actually know. We have barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our knowledge of the chemistry of life on this planet.

Now that you know that, can you understand that designing a molecule to antagonize a specific chemical reaction may seem like a good idea, until you realize that you have no idea what else it may do? Think about all the other chemistry happening that we don’t know about yet? Every manipulation of nature can have vast unanticipated domino effects. It’s like playing molecular Russian roulette.

This is why it seems like there are 20 seconds of side effects listed for every 30 second pharmaceutical drug ad. When it comes to what we eat, breathe, put on our skin and the pills we swallow, we are all guinea pigs to the new chemicals being pumped into our bodies. It would seem that this little experiment we have been a part of isn’t going so well, as more and more people are sick from the refined, packaged foods of the modern society.

As a society and as humanity, we can’t afford to just keep sweep under the rug another undeniable reality.  The more people switch back to a diet and lifestyle that works with their biology, the more they are experiencing rapid and dramatic shifts back into health and vitality, often in cases of supposedly incurable diseases. We know this first hand as a huge part of our own healing journeys and from our amazingly transformative experiences with clients healing themselves. It’s one of our favorite topics to cover in our 12-week online course, Closing Your Nurture Gap: A path to radical healing, and personalized consulting services. We, of course, love to share about it here on our blog and on our YouTube channel.

Okay, so now that we know “natural,” meaning biologically advantageous, is better in theory, how do we put it into practice? How do we know what is truly natural and what is hype when there are multi-billion-dollar industries with huge marketing budgets designed to deceive us into buying harmful products? How do we protect ourselves from buying junk thinking we are making healthy choices?

This gets tricky, given that the FDA does not have a clear, legally binding definition of the word “natural.” You can legally label anything “natural.” After all, every man-made chemical came from somewhere in nature at some point. And natural isn’t always good for you. After all, arsenic is natural and it’s poisonous. Traci’s dad used to point both of these things out to her, and it would irritate her at the time, but we also see that they are true. Furthermore, when we cut and cook vegetables, say to make a stew, couldn’t we say that stew was “man-made”?

It gets tricky when anything can be called natural. If “natural” is not a hard line but exists more on a continuum from spontaneously formed in nature to totally artificial, where do we draw the line as consumers? At what point does our manipulation of the world around us become unnatural? At what point are molecules too foreign and start to do damage?

What are some simple guidelines that will help you as a consumer work with, and not against, your own biology and the larger web of life into which we are intricately woven?

Join us for “Natural” Part 2: Navigating marketing tricks that rob nature of its meaning, as we delve into these questions, and get down to the nitty gritty practicalities of shopping in the industrial age.