‘Natural,’ ‘Organic’: Some Buzzwords for Pure Food

Natural and organic .

It’s impossible to walk down a supermarket aisle without being assaulted by the buzzwords of purity. Advertising of all kinds draws heavily on magic words and the advertising of the food industry these days is heavily larded with the cliches of naturalness. Behind every label, every picture of golden grains basking in the sun, lies an implied statement, an assumed truth. It is wise to think about the assumptions behind the slogan or the catch phrase before we put our money on the counter.

Plato used the word pharmacon to refer to both medicines and poisons. You had to look to the context to know which meaning of the term applied. In our own day, the terms natural and organic are spectacularly uninformative if taken in isolation, but are often treated as holy terms.

Natural Toxicants

The Institute of Food Technologists issued a report last summer on the problem of natural toxicants present in food. Take fiber, for example. My informal review of the current world view reveals that fiber ranks just slightly behind nuclear disarmament as a cure of all the ills that flesh is heir to. But lo and behold! It turns out that bran-rich foods often contain substances called phytates which, in combination with bran, impair the ability of the intestines to absorb zinc, iron, magnesium, calcium and phosphorous. This poses no problem in most cases. In a well-balanced diet, bran is good for you. But in excess, or to the exclusion of essential nutrients, it’s, well, toxic.

I was saddened to learn that sashimi, raw shellfish, and (are you ready for this?) Brussels sprouts and red cabbage contain thiaminases, chemicals that destroy the essential B vitamin thiamin. Please don’t let this news drive you to extreme measures such as cooking your oysters. Again, in the context of a well-balanced diet, things will work themselves out nicely.

Dr. John B. Selhorst of the Medical College of Virginia and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. on the connection between excessive consumption of beef liver and a disease called pseudotumor cerebri. The connection seems to be that people who consume over 10 times the RDA for Vitamin A make themselves sick. When the FDA tested cyclamates and saccharin they gave their laboratory rats a dose such that a human would have to drink 800 cans of diet soft drinks per day to match it. Those of us who relish an occasional entree of liver and onions will thank the powers that be that the FDA hasn’t tested liver.

We have known for years that carrots contain carotatoxin. According to Drs. John Urquhart and Klaus Heilmann in their wise little book “Risk Watch”: “There are no long-term toxicological studies on carrots, but the acute toxicity and chemical structure of carotatoxin alone are so fearsome that this biochemical would not be at all acceptable as a food additive.” And, speaking of additives, did you know that the most despised of “artificial additives,” monosodium glutamate, is an amino acid that appears naturally in tomato sauce and cheese?

Please, don’t let these anomalies drive you back to the Twinkie diet. The moral is that natural and organic are not magic words that free us from discretion. You can’t judge a book by its cover, and you certainly can’t judge the cereal by the box.