Yakoob on 23/8/2012 at 06:14

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(http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/10/natural-vs-organic-cereal/) Interesting study I just found:



And of course the typical "reasons why non-organic is bad:"



Some of the brands that tout naturanless in spite of being quite terrible include Back to Nature, Bear Naked, Peace Cereal, Kashi or 365.

Now, I already knew the US food industry is all about maximizing profit with no concern for health or environment, but learning this just really ticked me off. They're not merely trying to suppress information or encourage favorable studies - they are downright lying to the public right on the box of their products, WHILE having the nerve to charge more for an inferior product. This is like a whole knew evil exploitative level of capitalism right here. How this shit is even remotely allowed by the FDA is beyond me.

Yes I totally was one of the gullible fools who assumed that "natural = organic." While I only buy organic/natural very occasionally, I still feel really damn cheated. And this begs the question - if "natural" is all BS, how can we be sure that "organic" really is as organic as it claims? After all, the milk industry has done a great job of(http://www.cornucopia.org/2008/01/dairy-report-and-scorecard/) skirting around the federal regulations and getting certification when it clearly shouldn't have.

EDIT: tho, the more I've been reading about "organic" food the more I am starting considering buying into it. yes the effects of GMO/pesticides/etc. are still heavily debated, but logic and hunches point that they probably aren't the best for you

demagogue on 23/8/2012 at 07:04

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"Natural" and "Unnatural" are among the most prone to abuse terms in law. It allows people to offload any conspiracy they want into a food or product just because it "feels unnatural to me" ... It's "GMO", "has chemicals", "is Mexican", "is Chinese"... But often there's no independent justification for it aside from the foreignness. It's just built off hysteria.

As for those "studies", (1) immunity markers have never been used in marketed GMOs, not in forever anyway, and they stopped the practice (edit: for foods) decades ago, (2) the infamous study that showed intestine damage used incredibly irresponsible science to basically induce the intestine damage in the lab animals to grab the headline. It's been hoisted as a poster child for "bad science" so many times in the scientific community that it ... hasn't stopped it from still being quoted all the time by activists anyway.

The FDA is quite right to not regulate for "unnatural" things, since there is only one typical purpose for the term: to make people feel nauseous about a new and foreign product by virtue of the newness and foreignness alone. If there were an actual ascertainable risk, they could just regulate for that directly. If there actually were a valid scientific study that said, hey, these pesticide-producing GMOs have intestine-eating toxins in them. Boom, toxin -> banned. (Edit: I won't speak for the other additives in foods you mentioned though. Some are better than others.)

Of course the non-scientific population doesn't always care what the science says, only what a headline says and they let their imagination fill in the blanks. This is how all conspiracies work. They look for the "blank" and fill it in with the conspiracy. This is why the FDA is run by scientists and not by popular vote. For decades people thought microwaved food gave us cancer because it was new, invisible, and of course you can always find holes in science, and that gave them a "blank", and it took a long time for it to get normalized. (Edit: And companies know this, so they would use terms like "unnatural" to demonize their competition if the FDA gave them that hook. That's another reason why I think the FDA doesn't even want to give people the hook to think foods are risky without some justification. The link between "unnatural" to "unhealthy" is just too tight & misleading in people's perception.)

Edit: This is different from the debate on "organic", which has a very clear, justifiable, and enforceable standard, and the FDA & USDA does regulate for that. If an organic farm gets cross-pollinated from a GMO farm so they lose their organic status, then they have a great claim to sue the GMO farmer for not preventing gene flow. That's one of the few legitimate GMO claims you can find in US practice.

This is also different from marketers exploiting consumers into buying unhealthy food. I have no doubt they used focus groups to pick out terms like "natural", "light", etc, to build a case for a product looking like edible-panacea, but it's actually a very unhealthy food, and that *is* a swarmy practice. I'd agree. The reason the FDA might not get involved is, as long as a product is safe for consumption and not outright fraudulent in a "material claim" (the legal standard), it doesn't want to be too paternalistic in policing what people want to eat for themselves. Consumers are grown-ups. They should know marketers exaggerate & you always take what they say with a grain of salt. Anyway it's not the government's place to tell people they can't be junk-food-eating oafs or to censor labels because companies only want money and will say anything (as long as it's just obvious "puffery"). There's a good case that it's the parents place to tell their kids to look out for that though. I don't want my kids eating just anything. I'm not worried about risk, but them feeling as healthy as they reasonably can, have an apple instead of ice cream sometimes...

Edit: I said other stuff but getting long so I just put it (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uW4ipT_EHWpA2TkYNUqDr1J2nqYO4VRoankLkjUzHwc/edit) here if anyone is curious.

Fafhrd on 23/8/2012 at 09:14

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They can do that? I was only aware of the cases that went the other way, where the farmers' crop was contaminated by the GMO pollen, and the patent holder of the modified crop sued the independents into oblivion for growing and selling their crop without paying royalties.

faetal on 23/8/2012 at 09:49

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Everything Demagogue said.

It's like the "natural" remedies business, which tries to draw an artificial line between "natural remedies" (read: herbs purported to contain a therapeutic compound, but delivered in non-controlled amounts due to natural variation, plus also containing other useless or potentially harmful compounds) vs. "synthetic" medicines (read: purified molecules which exert a therapeutic effect).

The public has an emotionally biased knee-jerk response to what is deemed "natural" or "synthetic" but really, all that matters is how it affects the body, since the primary purpose of digestion is to reduce complex foods down to the base constituents in order to metabolically process them.

heywood on 23/8/2012 at 10:26

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No, because no claim was being made. Putting the word natural on the box doesn't actually mean anything.