Is Natural Food Actually Healthier?
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In 1997, a 14-year-old named Nathan Zahner convinced 43 out of 50 classmates to sign a petition banning a dangerous chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. The chemical was water. This episode is everything that happened next.
The word "natural" has no legal definition on a U.S. food label. The FDA has been trying to define it since 1993, received over 7,000 public comments in 2015, and has done nothing. Meanwhile, the market for natural-labeled products is estimated at over $50 billion annually. Companies are not putting that word on products by accident, and consumers consistently believe it means something it is not required to mean: no pesticides, no GMOs, no artificial ingredients. None of those have ever been required to use the label.
In this episode, Zoë and Kylee trace the naturalistic fallacy, the assumption that natural equals good and artificial equals bad, from Sylvester Graham's Victorian theories about white flour and masturbation, through John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, through the Make America Healthy Again commission's 2025 decision to replace heavily regulated synthetic dyes with natural alternatives subject to less FDA oversight. They cover what the psychology research actually says about why the label changes how food tastes to people, what "natural flavor" legally means (not much), when natural versus artificial actually matters clinically, and why the appeal-to-nature fallacy has a body count when it gets applied to vaccines.
Your mitochondria are not reading the label.
Lightly edited for clarity. Auto-generated captions may contain errors.
Zoë Welcome to Your Diet Sucks, the podcast that won't make you eat beaver ass. I'm Zoë Rom. And I'm Kylee Van Horn. Really put a lot of thought into this cold open. There was no other way to start this. No context needed. But I want to tell you a story, Kylee. So in 1997, a 14-year-old named Nathan Zahner presented his science fair project to 50 fellow students in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He circulated a powerful petition that called for the strict regulation, if not the total ban of a dangerous chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. His petition listed all the facts, and these are true: Dihydrogen Monoxide kills thousands of people per year through accidental inhalation. It's found in virtually every lake, every stream, and every reservoir in America. It's a major component of acid rain. It's found in the removed tumors of cancer patients. It accelerates the corrosion of metals. And in its solid state, dihydrogen monoxide causes severe tissue damage. In its gaseous form, it can even cause extreme burns.
Kylee That sounds serious.
Zoë 43 out of 50 students voted to ban it. Only one of them recognized it as water. Zahner won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair. Journalist James K. Glassman coined the term "Zahnerism," which is the use of a true fact to lead a scientifically illiterate public to a false conclusion. He just named it like a chemical instead of like the thing you drink. He made it sound intentionally more chemical, more unnatural. The hoax didn't stop there. In 2002, a radio talk show host in Atlanta told listeners that the city's water supply had been found contaminated with dihydrogen monoxide. A local TV station covered the scandal. The city water department had to literally issue a press release. Clarifying that there was no more dihydrogen monoxide in the system than was allowed by law, which is to say, all of it because it's water.
Kylee Oh my God.
Zoë In 2004, a city council in Aliso Viejo, California nearly passed a resolution banning foam cups at city events, partly because dihydrogen monoxide was involved in their production. This is the episode. Everything we're going to talk about today is some version of this experiment. And by the end, you're going to be very, very suspicious of the word natural.
Kylee I think oftentimes it's used interchangeably with healthier. I'll get on a call with someone and they'll be like, well, I eat natural things or I eat healthy things and I'm like, okay, what does that mean?
Zoë For today's episode, I bought the all-natural Cheetos. I've noticed that I also have a human psychology and I can also fall prey to giving in to the naturalistic fallacy — the inclination to believe that because something is natural, it is somehow good or morally superior in some way. I have a hard time imagining myself buying a family size bag of normal Cheetos, but I can and do buy the family size bag of the Simply Cheetos where it's a more understated Chester the Cheetah on the cover. The bag is white, so you know it's healthy, because it looks a little more Gwyneth Paltrow than full Chester the Cheetah.
Kylee I feel like I see it most often in fueling plans — oh, I only want to use natural food products versus gels. So maple syrup and honey. How does that work for people? I mean, it depends. You can use those things, but is it the best? Maybe, maybe not.
Zoë We're talking about the appeal-to-nature fallacy, the assumption that if something is natural, it is good, and if it is artificial or synthetic, then it is bad. Philosophers have a specific name for this. G. E. Moore coined "naturalistic fallacy" in Principia Ethica in 1903. The philosophical version is about ethics, or the idea that Good can be reduced to natural. The wellness version is a lot more about food and commodities, but it's the same logical structure with really different stakes.
Kylee So do you think this plays into food morality?
Zoë Yes, this is one specific flavor of food morality. And it's not a niche problem. It is the implicit logic behind clean eating, behind the anti-GMO panic, supplement marketing, anti-vaccine rhetoric, and a large chunk of sports nutrition culture. I think it is genuinely one of the most profitable logical errors in human history. The core issue here is that natural is a vibes-based category. It does not have any legal definition in the U.S. food labeling system. The FDA has had no formal definition for natural on food labels since it opened public comment in 2015. Its informal policy since the 1990s has been that nothing artificial or synthetic has been added that would not normally be expected in that food. Which is the regulatory equivalent of a shrug emoji.
Kylee I mean, it's problematic, because then people just automatically assume. If it's on a label, it's regulated, right? Or that it means something. We see that with even the egg industry, where they're like cage-free or free-range — these terms are not regulated.
Zoë In December of 2024, the FDA finalized a new definition of the word healthy as a nutrient content claim. Healthy now has a real regulatory definition with specific criteria around food groups, added sugar, saturated fat, and sodium. But natural doesn't. They regulated healthy before they regulated natural. Just let that sit.
Zoë Natural compared to what? Everything is made of atoms. Every food that we eat has been altered by human activity over thousands of years of agriculture, selective breeding, fermentation, and cooking. The banana you eat today looks nothing like a wild banana from 10,000 years ago. We engineered it to be seedless and sweet. It's still completely natural. Cooking, technically, could be considered unnatural because it changes the chemical composition of food. Cooked food is what allowed the human brain to get as big as it did, according to some evolutionary biologists. If you apply the naturalistic logic consistently, you'd be eating raw meat without pants in a forest, which to be fair, some people are currently doing. Botulinum toxin is the most acutely toxic substance known to science. One to two nanograms per kilogram of body weight can be lethal. It is also completely natural. Synthetic folic acid is extensively processed and meaningfully reduced neural tube defect rates by about 35% since mandatory fortification in 1998. Nothing natural about it. Enormous, measurable, documented benefit.
Kylee I've had people be like, I'm not gonna get iron from cereal because it's not a natural form of iron, and then they go and take an iron supplement.
Zoë It has a very traceable history. The specific American lineage of natural food equals moral purity starts with Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister turned dietary reformer who believed that white flour, meat, alcohol, and spices inflamed the body and stirred baser passions — basically that it caused sexual excess and masturbation. He believed these foods caused everything from insanity to early death. He died at age 49. His solution was whole wheat bread, cold water baths, no condiments, no meat, no coffee. His followers were called the Grahamites. The foundational logic of the modern clean eating movement was built on this Victorian preacher's theory about self-pleasure. You're welcome.
Zoë John Harvey Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was basically the Goop lab of the Gilded Age. He invented cornflakes specifically to be a bland, non-stimulating food that might suppress the sexual appetite. He also invented peanut butter, so win some, lose some. His Battle Creek Sanitarium is basically where wealthy Americans went for natural healing delivered via high-pressure enemas. Henry Ford went there. John D. Rockefeller. Franklin Roosevelt. Celebrated industrialists who were looking for natural healing delivered via deeply, deeply unnatural treatments. His work was underpinned by Seventh Day Adventist theology that emphasized the body as a temple, natural foods as God's medicine, and purity of diet as proximity to God. The American breakfast cereal industry is his legacy.
Zoë In the 1960s and 70s, the Back to the Land movement reframed natural food as anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, antiestablishment. The ideology inverted, but the underlying logic is pretty similar: nature is pure and industry is corrupt. The Smithsonian described this cultural transition as going from a hippie sideshow to a $100 million business, because the counterculture's natural food aesthetic was extremely profitable. The USDA organic certification launched in 2002. That is a real regulatory standard with some amount of real agricultural meaning. Organic Oreos are still Oreos. But the certification gave the natural food movement something more of a legal anchor, and the entire industry built an aspirational aesthetic around it. Whole Foods, wood floors, bulk bins, chalkboard menus, prices that signal virtue. Clean eating emerged as a term in the mid-2000s. It wasn't medical, it wasn't legal, it was just a vibe. The word clean implies the opposite. If clean food exists, then everything else is dirty. The moral framing is baked in from the jump.
Zoë A 2019 study in the journal Food Quality and Preference found that the presence of a natural claim on a product label significantly increased consumer perception of healthfulness, safety, and taste, even when the nutritional profile was identical to a labeled-as-artificial product. The label literally changes how food tastes to people. It's not a signal. It's a flavor.
Zoë There are studies on studies of people trying natural versus unnatural wines. No one can tell the difference. Natural versus unnatural yogurt, no one can tell the difference. Even professional James Beard-trained chefs couldn't tell the difference in baked goods, and many people actually preferred the taste of synthetic vanilla when it comes to ice cream. Paul Rozin at Penn and Carol Nemeroff have studied what they call contagion thinking — the idea that people treat natural and artificial categories as if they carry moral contamination. Natural contaminated by artificial means something is ruined. The "if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it" heuristic is the naturalistic fallacy collapsed into a cute exercise. Benzaldehyde, which is the primary flavor compound in almonds and cherries, sounds like a chemical. It is also technically a chemical. It's just found in cherries and almonds. Everything is a chemical. The heuristic is not about safety. It's about familiarity, and familiarity is not a good way to judge safety.
Zoë People with more education are actually not reliably less susceptible to the naturalistic bias in food choices. In some contexts they are even more susceptible, because they have more sophisticated frameworks for rationalizing their pre-existing preferences. See: Zoë's Simply Cheetos. This plays out in cigarette marketing. American Spirit cigarettes, branded as using organic tobacco and being natural, sell better in healthy communities because those people are like, oh well, I'm gonna smoke, but it'll be the healthy, natural cigarette.
Zoë If you rename water dihydrogen monoxide, you make it sound like an industrial chemical and high school students vote to ban it. The bias runs in both directions. Something natural sounds safe, and something chemical sounds dangerous, regardless of what the substance actually is.
Kylee What about athletes who report feeling better when they cut out artificial ingredients? Maybe it's in their head. Can we hold space?
Zoë If you eat a lot of processed foods and then you go to eating less processed foods, you might feel better. Or if you go from paying no attention to what you eat to a healthy amount of attention, you might feel better. There's also a related nocebo effect, where athletes who believe artificial sweeteners cause GI distress are more likely to report GI distress after consuming them independent of any physiological effect. If you believe something will make you feel bad, the belief itself can produce that feeling.
Zoë There are narrow cases where natural versus artificial has genuine relevance. For allergen identification, athletes with specific food allergies or intolerances: the biological source of a natural flavor would be clinically important. If a natural flavor is derived from wheat, that matters for someone with celiac disease. Minimally processed whole foods do tend to be higher in fiber, micronutrients, and phytocompounds, not because they are natural, but because processing sometimes removes or degrades those things. The reason to prefer whole wheat is that it has more fiber, not that it is more natural. Those are different arguments, and only one of them is scientifically meaningful. Everything is toxic at some dose. Everything is safe at a low enough dose. Naturalness determines nothing about toxicity. Dose does.
Kylee I want to go darker for a second, because there are places where this goes beyond marketing and gets into dangerous territory.
Zoë The anti-vaccine rhetoric relies substantially on this appeal to nature: that your immune system is natural and vaccines are an industrial, pharmaceutical, artificial invention, therefore natural immunity is somehow superior. The logic is structured identically to everything else we've talked about, just applied to immunology instead of food, and the risks there are extremely high. For measles, natural infection produces serious risk of encephalitis, pneumonia, and death. Belief in this fallacy has contributed to measles outbreaks in communities with declining vaccination rates, pertussis deaths in infants too young to be vaccinated, and substantial COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. That's not a side issue. Belief in this fallacy and the way the industry propagates it has a body count, and that body count includes children.
Zoë Natural and clean eating language is now a standard feature of orthorexia presentations, and it increasingly appears alongside restrictive presentations of anorexia and ARFID. The framework makes restriction socially legible, even admirable. An athlete who refuses to eat anything processed during competition might be cheered for their discipline while experiencing what we would recognize as a clinical problem. There's also a class component. Natural food is expensive food. Organic, minimally processed, locally sourced, small batch, artisanal — it all costs more. The moral premium functions as a class marker whether or not it has that intent. Canned beans, fortified cereals, frozen vegetables: nutritionally excellent, broadly accessible, more or less affordable. Positioning those as inferior to expensive natural options is a form of nutrition classism. The language of dirty food mapping onto what low-income families can afford is not a coincidence.
Zoë In April of 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced a plan to phase out all nine petroleum-based synthetic food dyes from the U.S. food supply by the end of 2026. The phrase "petroleum-based" is doing so much work here. It makes it sound like you're eating gasoline. The synthetic dyes currently being phased out are, right now, among the most regulated substances in the entire food supply. FD&C certified color additives require batch-by-batch FDA certification before they can be used. Every single production lot is tested and individually approved. The natural color alternatives replacing them? Companies self-certify those. Natural colors are non-certified additives. No batch testing. No FDA prior approval required. In the name of making food safer, MAHA is replacing heavily regulated synthetic dyes with less regulated natural ones. And they're framing it as a consumer protection victory. The naturalistic fallacy is so powerful it has literally inverted the actual regulatory logic.
Zoë I think asking better questions: not asking "is this natural," but asking what is the evidence for this specific substance? What is the dose at which this is harmful? What does it look like in the context of my overall dietary pattern? And: who benefits from me believing that this is better because it's natural? For athletes specifically, performance and recovery are driven by energy availability, macronutrient adequacy, micronutrient sufficiency, hydration, and sleep. None of those goals care whether your gel came from natural fruit puree or artificial maltodextrin. Your mitochondria are not reading the label.
Zoë The ingredient you can't pronounce heuristic needs to die. Pyridoxine hydrochloride is vitamin B6. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. Tocopherol is vitamin E. Pronounceability is not a safety signal. Familiarity is not safety. You should be extremely suspicious of moral language in nutrition. Clean, dirty, toxic, pure, natural, real — these are not scientific categories. They are marketing categories. And in some cases, clinical red flags. When you hear them, your skepticism should go right up. Not because the product is necessarily bad, but because the language is telling you something about who is trying to tell you something. Nature is not a wellness coach. It is indifferent chemistry. But your skepticism? That is actually useful. Use it on the label, not on the science.