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2. 95% or more of the ingredients are certified organic. This qualifies the product to be called organic and use the USDA organic symbol, also… even though it is not 100% organic.
From a health perspective it has long been known by herbalists that some of the most prized herbs are from the wild. That’s because the health properties of these herbs comes not only from the plants themselves, but also from the soil, water and weather of their native habitat. Herbs naturally grow where the conditions are suited for them. These conditions often include things like unique mineral compositions of the soil or water and specific growing conditions which maximize the health benefits of the herb. While the same plant can be grown on a farm, the same conditions of its native wild habitat cannot be duplicated through agriculture. Because of this and other reasons mentioned above, we place wild sources of ingredients in health products as the most natural.
Nowadays in addition to alcohol extracts we have all kinds of extraction methods, with new ones being developed all the time. There are products made with glycerin extraction, freeze drying, chemical solvent extracts, carbon dioxide extracts, spray drying, biological (i.e., “natural” or “bio-identical”) production with genetically engineered micro-organisms, and even more elaborate laboratory methods.
Alcohol is a natural substance. Even before there were humans, animals occasionally became intoxicated from eating naturally fermented fruit or tree sap. Early, prehistoric humans probably had the same experience. It didn’t take long for hunter-gatherer peoples to learn how to make alcoholic beverages for themselves. There are pygmy tribes in Africa who make mead from wild honey. They are hunter-gatherers. They or similar peoples have probably been drinking fermented honey for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Natural Definition 3: Consistent With Our Self Healing Physiology
Some companies try to have the best of both worlds: their products contain extracted neutraceutical ingredients, but are put in a base that includes the whole food source of the ingredient also. These kinds of products may be more natural than products that use only extracted ingredients.
My second definition of natural helps to evaluate the wide range of supplements and neutraceuticals in another way. This way of defining natural has to do with how closely a product or ingredient resembles or is identical to what is naturally found within our body. A good example of this is the term “natural” as it is applied to hormones. For many years products called “natural” hormones have been available as over-the-counter and prescription products. Natural estrogen and natural progesterone have been among the most popular of these products.
There are also time and place elements to what is natural in Nature. We understand this easily, also. For example, we know it would be unnatural for dinosaurs to live nowadays or for a fish to suddenly grow legs and start walking on land. It was natural for mammoths to live in arctic conditions 20,000 years ago, just as it is natural now for elephants to live in tropical climates.
We could go a step further and say the most natural sources of wild ingredients are from the most pure, pristine, remote and primeval environments. Environments that have been stable ecosystems for thousands or tens of thousands of years or more. Environments that have not been polluted directly with herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals, plastics, drugs, petroleum products or any other human made materials. While it is impossible to find a place on Earth that is completely free of chemical contamination from humans, there are places that are more free of it than others.
The first pesticides came out of the chemical warfare industry before, during and after World War II. Chemists had developed potent toxins for killing people, but after the war there was little opportunity to use them on people. So the companies that made these chemicals figured out ways to use them on insects. This was a new kind of warfare, perpetrated in the name of serving humanity: a war against crop pests.
In fact, whole sources of natural ingredients may contain dozens of natural ingredients that augment or enhance the activity of one ingredient that is considered to be the active or main ingredient. Vitamin E is another example where whole food sources contain a wide range of forms of Vitamin E, while synthetic or extracted products only contain one form. Coffee, a natural herb, is another example. It’s considered that caffeine is the active ingredient in coffee, yet few coffee drinkers would think of switching to using caffeine pills instead of drinking coffee. Coffee has dozens of active ingredients and caffeine is only one of them. In fact, coffee is the single biggest source of antioxidants in the American diet. And perhaps worldwide. Coffee may have more antioxidants than green tea, which is considered to be a healthy herbal beverage. The 1.4 billion cups of coffee consumed each day worldwide are a source of dozens of ingredients that may confer health benefits that are not the same as those found in just caffeine.
Even among such products as water filters there are varying degrees of natural. The most natural water filters are those that completely eliminate unnatural toxins, and which also restore water to the properties it has when found in natural springs and streams. The restoration of water to its natural state includes adjustments to its mineral content, pH, and electro-magnetic properties.
The investigation of what is natural can go on and on. For example, drying something in the sun or shade is natural, but drying in large commercial ovens where the temperature may be too high, is unnatural. Extracting an essential oil (like a floral fragrance) with another oil is natural, but extracting it with hexane as a solvent is unnatural. Extracting “active” ingredients from a natural source is less natural than using the whole plant or animal or mineral it came from.
Neutraceuticals are often used as substitutes for drugs or with an intention to have a drug-like effect,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], even though they are sold as food supplements and not as drugs. Some people want to use a natural substitute for a drug, something that will be strong and “get results” in the same way a drug might be used. And it may be better to use a natural drug-like product than an unnatural drug, if the natural product is safe and effective. But using drug-like natural products is still following the drug paradigm of modern medicine. This in itself is somewhat unnatural because it may lead the consumer to think that the product will do it all for them, without them having to change their lives towards a more natural way of living.
We feel that if a product claims to contain ingredients from whole foods, it should be from foods that people naturally eat. Or at least the labeling should indicate that the whole food used is a form of yeast.
With this way of defining natural, a supplement or a neutraceutical can be used to support the normal biochemical pathways in our bodies. In fact,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], this is part of the definition of a supplement that distinguishes it from a drug. Drugs are used to treat disease or disease symptoms. Supplements are used to support health.
2. Farm, forestry and weed or insect control projects from nearby areas or watersheds may be using chemical herbicides or pesticides. Factories may also be located near to or upwind or upstream from collecting sites. The drift or runoff or groundwater from nearby areas may contaminate the wild crafted areas or organic farms.
Natural Definition 4: Protecting Health From Unnatural Influences
Yeast are natural and they do exist almost everywhere. Almost all foods harvested from or grown in Nature have yeast cells on their surfaces. Animals and people eat these yeast cells when they eat the foods that carry them. In fact, even if you wash the yeast off and then leave the food out in the air for a while,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], yeast spores will settle on the surface of the food. There is enough yeast in the ambient air to use it instead of packaged yeast to raise bread and other baked products, or to ferment alcoholic beverages. So in this sense, eating yeast is natural.
Aside from using toxic chemicals, modern agriculture has also depleted the original soils. Farmed foods no longer have the same nutrients they had hundreds of years ago, because the nutrients are not in the soil anymore. The use of commercial fertilizers is aimed at maximizing plant growth, not at restoring the soil to primeval conditions. Organic farming and its variations (e.g., biodynamic farming and permaculture) attempt to recreate a natural soil. So organic farming is much more natural than conventional modern farming. But the soil in Nature,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], unchanged by humans, is still more natural than that found in organic farms.
The widespread use of alcohol rose with civilization and agriculture. In that sense, alcohol is only as natural as agriculture and civilization itself. But alcohol itself is still a natural substance. It’s how we use it that determines how natural it is for us. The use of alcohol for making extracts of medicinal substances is perhaps not totally natural from an evolutionary perspective, but it is close to the most natural end of the spectrum. The most natural alcohol extracted products use organic alcohol. Some companies go a step further and use organic grape alcohol instead of grain alcohol. Grape alcohol may be tolerated better by those with sensitivities to gluten or grains.
H.H. the Dalai Lama once said that if we make a bomb, we should think that we are making it to drop on our own heads. That’s the nature of warfare. In the same way, when we wage war on Nature we are only attacking ourselves. Countless research studies in the last few decades show conclusively that synthetic pesticides and herbicides are adversely affecting our health and the health of other living beings… not just insects or weeds.
Before there was farming, there was semi-wild cultivation or tending of wild plants. And before that there was just foraging and gathering (and hunting). Gathering from the wild is even more natural than even the best organic farming.
DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, as well as the chemical warfare-like, nerve damaging organophosphate pesticides, are not natural to life. Living beings did not evolve with them and do not have adaptive mechanisms for handling them. Not only did they cause the near extinction of many birds of prey,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], they also harmed humans and other forms of life. Despite the existence of thousands of scientific research articles on the toxic effects on people and other life forms of dozens of herbicides and pesticides, we still use them in commercial farming and pest control.
Just because something grows in Nature does not mean it is totally natural. But “natural” is not a single thing. It’s more of a continuum with the most natural at one end, and the most unnatural at the other end. In between are many degrees of natural and unnatural.
When it comes to supplements and herbal products it’s amazing how many of them are not organic… and how few of them are. Manufacturers, natural health care practitioners, patients and consumers all tend to ignore whether a product is organic or not. These same people may try to eat organic foods as much as possible, but for some reason there is a suspension of the organic requirement when it comes to supplements. This is a mistake, especially when people use the same supplements for long periods of time. Such use can be a significant source of non-organic exposure in the diet. After all, supplements and herbs are part of our diets.
This is an important point because when we talk about “natural” we usually are focused in the present or the recent past from a human or historical perspective. For example, we talk about all the natural foods that we grow on farms. But agriculture has only been around for 8,000 to 10,000 years. That seems like a very long time from a historical perspective. But from an evolutionary perspective it’s a very short time… too short a time to say that we have evolved to be biologically adapted to agriculture. Too short a time to say that agriculture is natural for humans or that the products of agriculture are truly natural foods for people.
We use the word “natural” a lot to describe all kinds of things... food, health, supplements, lifestyle and more. This article addresses the definition of natural in general, and natural as it applies to health products in particular. The entire food and supplement industry uses “natural” to describe their products. So I thought I should say a few things about what is meant by “natural” as it applies to foods, supplements,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and health products.
Obviously, it is more natural to use a supplement or product that is identical to that which is found in us naturally. And it is also better to use a bio-identical nutrient or supplement than the “wrong” form that is not bio-identical. For example, it has been found that synthetically made trans-fatty acids are not healthy.
From an evolutionary point of view, at the most natural end of the continuum are wild foods,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], herbs and raw minerals that have existed in their present state for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. At the other end are synthetic drugs, radiation and chemicals that have only been around for a few years or decades.
The bottom line is that organic or wildcrafted ingredients are usually more pesticide free than ingredients that are certified pesticide free but which are not organic. A product that is both organic and certified to be toxin free is even better.
This sense of what is natural has to do with evolution and biology. Living things evolve over time and in relationship to their environments or ecosystems. Any species that is successful at any given time and in any particular place has evolved to be natural in that time and place. Natural implies being in a state of balance with the environment within a certain time period.
This is especially true when one considers that many medicinal herbs are grown on commercial farms in the same way that non-organic produce is grown. To make matters worse, many of the medicinal herbs are grown in Asia or other parts of the world where pesticide regulation is weak or non-existent. Many herbal supplements are contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals and other toxins.
To deal with the issue of toxicity in herbal and other supplements, industry groups and specific distributors and manufacturers have developed standards and testing protocols. These methods help to insure that the finished product is not only free of bacterial contamination, but also is free of toxin residues. These voluntary programs are commendable, but may not be sufficient.
The ingredient extraction process of making supplements follows the model of the drug industry because it focuses on a single active ingredient. The only difference is that the ingredient is from a natural source rather than a synthetic one. But even this difference is does not completely distinguish natural ingredient extracts from drugs. Many drugs are actually made in the same way, by using extracts from natural ingredients.
They key here is that the animal is raised in a way that is consistent with its evolutionary biology. Cattle did not evolve eating large amounts of grain or corn, so the meat from animals that are grain fed is unnatural (and also unhealthy). Eating wild fish is considered natural and healthy, but the important issue is that the fish are wild,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], not that they are fish. Wild fish grow up and eat a wild, natural diet. That’s why they have the properties we consider to be healthy. Farmed fish that are fed fish feed are not natural and are not as healthy as wild fish. The same is true for all animal species. If they are raised in a way that is consistent with their evolution and natural habitat, they are natural. If they are not, they are not natural.
Birds who eat fish are at the high end of the food chain. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service runs a national wildlife forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon. Here they test tissue samples for toxins from birds from all over the world, including penguins from the Antarctic and birds from remote ocean islands. And they have never found a bird that did not contain measurable amounts of one or more pesticides or other toxins. If this is true for birds from remote areas, it’s also true for fish from remote areas.
On the other hand, some people feel that the health of modern people has degenerated so much that we need stronger doses of natural products, that the “old” approach of using simple herbs and foods is not enough anymore. Some say that since we live unnatural lives, we need stronger doses of natural substances to restore natural health. And they may be right.
Raising animals in crowded conditions also makes them more susceptible to infectious diseases. They have to be given large amounts of antibiotics to be kept alive. This makes them even more unnatural as foods because some of the antibiotics remains in the meat derived from those animals.
There are many shades of grey on the natural health product continuum and many ways to define natural. Should we use products that are not completely natural to achieve more natural health, or can we achieve natural health with only truly natural products? I believe there is no right or wrong answer for everyone. I am simply trying to define the status of products in the natural health continuum. It is up to each of us to make our own choices. The important thing is to keep making choices that are in the more natural direction rather than the more unnatural direction.
As civilization became more “advanced”, people found ways to concentrate the healing potencies of natural products even further. With the production of alcoholic beverages came herbal tinctures and medicinal beverages, for example.
Organic farming is more natural than non-organic farming. Originally all agriculture was organic. But because there was no other kind of farming, no one had to call it organic. But as people used more and more unnatural chemicals in farming, farming itself became more and more unnatural. To begin with farmers used toxic metals like copper or arsenic as insecticides. Then in the mid 20th century synthetic pesticides were introduced.
There are other organic certification systems from other countries, and even within the U.S.
To get around the toxicity issue of aquatic ingredients, some companies use special methods to remove the toxins from the finished product. Companies that do this produce a more natural product than companies that don’t. Other companies try to get around the toxicity issue by using ingredients from fish lower on the food chain. And some companies that produce chlorella, which normally grows in the ocean, grow them in isolated tanks where toxins from the ocean cannot enter the environment. It's a strange paradox: in order to produce a more natural (i.e., toxin-free) product, the chlorella is grown in unnatural conditions.
How natural an agricultural food or ingredient is also depends a lot on how it is grown or raised. For example, beef or dairy cattle which are range fed or grass fed are more natural than the same animals that are raised eating grain in feedlots. In fact, the products from animals raised naturally vs. unnaturally are like entirely different foods. Beef that is grass fed has a lower fat level, and is low in saturated fat and high in unsaturated fat. Beef that is fed grain has the opposite fat profile: high in saturated fat and low in unsaturated fat. The fat from grass fed cattle is similar to the fat found in wild fish like salmon. Many people feel that eating salmon is healthy while eating red meat (i.e., beef) is unhealthy. But actually it depends on how the red meat is raised. Eating the meat of grass fed cattle is similar to eating wild fish like salmon. If eating wild salmon is healthy, then so is eating grass fed beef or bison.
Ingredients collected from the wilds are called wild crafted and are considered to be organic when they meet the criteria of organic certification and are certified as being organic. For wild crafted products this means the area they are collected from has to have been free of non-organic chemicals (e.g., most pesticides and herbicides) for at least 3 years. There also has to be a plan to harvest the products sustainably, and various other forms of documentation.
Green, non-toxic home, household and yard products that we can use instead of toxic ones are also natural, because by using them we protect ourselves from toxic products.
Products that protect us from unnatural electromagnetic fields and radiation are also natural, according to this definition of a natural product.
Some of these new methods are more natural than others. For example, freeze drying could be considered somewhat natural, in that freezing is a natural process. More importantly, freeze drying preserves the fresh constituents of products. So in a way, a freeze dried herb, for example, may be more like a fresh herb than an herb that was simply dried. Simple drying may be a more natural process, but freeze drying may create a product that is more like the fresh herb. So which is more or less natural?
The next step towards the drug-like direction is to isolate these key ingredients and to make a supplement out of them. This kind of supplement is now often called a “neutraceutical”, implying it is like a pharmaceutical but is made from natural nutrients. Neutraceuticals are often use large doses of an extracted ingredient… doses that are much larger than could be obtained by using a whole food source.
For additional information and comments about using whole herbs instead of drugs or extracts of herbs, please read Dr. Andrew Weil's article, Why Plants Are (Usually) Better Than Drugs. Dr. Weil has an undergraduate degree in botany and is an MD, and is considered to be an expert on natural medicine.
What is unnatural for health is everything that we have not had time to evolve with or adapt to. From this evolutionary perspective even agriculture is unnatural, because it has only existed for 10,000 years or less. Humans evolved with a hunting-gathering diet, not an agricultural diet. During the time that agriculture has existed we have not evolved or adapted healthily to eating all the products of agriculture. Agriculture has provided a more stable food supply that has allowed populations to grow. But it has not necessarily provided healthier foods or produced healthier people. Most scientists agree that humans had a healthier diet before agriculture developed.
Natural foods and health products have always existed. But in the 1960s and 70s it became a movement. The word “natural” was used by grass roots and counter-cultural whole food and organic proponents. Natural food stores increased in popularity. New companies were started that made natural products for this growing consumer demand. At first the natural foods/products movement was on the fringes of industry. But as sales increased the larger corporations took notice. Small natural food businesses had grown and were often bought by large multi-national corporations. Large corporations also started using the term “natural” in many of their own products. Pretty soon the word was used so much it failed to have any real meaning.
Whatever method is used to achieve lower levels of toxicity, it is important than any aquatic ingredients have certification of toxicity testing and relatively toxin-free status.
On the positive side, the nutrients fed to yeast are then incorporated into biological compounds. These biological forms of the nutrients are probably more natural than using the nutrients in isolated, inorganic forms. On the negative side, claiming that yeast sources of nutrients are whole foods may be a bit misleading. Most people who read a product label that says “whole food source” will think of fruits or vegetables first, and not yeast. To make matters worse, the yeast source of such nutrients are usually listed by their Latin name on the ingredient label. Most people do not recognize the scientific names of various yeast strains on a label. So there is a problem with disclosure of the real source of the whole food nutrients.
Many people who eat natural foods are opposed to eating genetically modified (GMO) foods. They look for non-GMO labels on foods. But the hybridization and selective breeding of both plants and animals over hundreds or thousands of years is a form of genetic modification. The products of agriculture and animal husbandry are technically not natural because they did not evolve through natural selection. Whether a specific agricultural product is healthy or not is another issue. Right now we are just talking about what is natural from an evolutionary or ecological perspective.
Animals that are raised in crowded or caged conditions are also not natural. Cage free, free range, and range fed animals are more natural and in fact are more healthy. That’s just common sense. Humans who exercise are more healthy than humans that sit around all the time. Humans that are crowded into prisons are more stressed than humans who come and go as they please. It’s the same with other animals.
We can see from these examples that we understand natural to be the ordinary ways of Nature, or the ways that Nature works.
From the perspective of evolutionary biology we could say that what is natural is what living beings have evolved with and adapted to: the air, water, soil, landscape, climate, other species and foods of the ecosystems they live in. We could go further and define natural health as a state of balance between an organism and the environment it evolved in. That is perhaps the ultimate biological definition of natural health. It’s an evolutionary definition.
3. 70% or more of the ingredients are certified organic. This allows the product to say “Made With Organic Ingredients” on the label or package, but does not qualify for using the USDA organic symbol.
So I have come up with my own definitions of natural. I have identified 4 ways of thinking about or defining natural in terms of products. The first way has to do with Nature and is sort of an evolutionary or ecological meaning of natural. The second way is about the form of a product and whether or not it is the same as or bio-identical to that found in our bodies. The third way of defining natural has to do with the normal functioning or physiology and biochemistry of the body’s self-maintenance or self-healing, and whether a product supports that or not. The fourth way is about preserving health or restoring health to a natural state by protecting health from unnatural influences.
Another way of defining a natural product is that it protects us from unnatural influences. These days we have many unnatural influences in our lives. Very few, if any, people actually live a natural life anymore. So now we may need more ways to get closer to being natural. We need antidotes to what is unnatural.
What Is "Natural" And What Are "Natural" Products?
by Shandor Weiss
1. Many herbicides and pesticides persist in soil and waterways for decades. The requirement that the area be free of such chemical uses for the last three years does not guarantee that such chemicals are not in the soil or water where the products are grown or collected.
Modern science is able to identify one to several key active ingredients in natural compounds that are considered to be the ones that confer the source’s properties. But modern science is not able to identify the complex interactions of all the constituents of natural substances and how they interact with each other. The use of key active ingredients in evaluating natural health products is a condescension to what is possible with science. It is not the highest form of truth about a substance.
One of the earliest civilizations, if not the earliest, was in Sumeria in the middle East. These people began farming perhaps as far back as 10,000 years ago. And they began making beer from farmed grains as far back as 9,000 years. In fact, scientists speculate that without the invention of beer making, civilization could not have developed. As more and more people lived in larger and larger communities, the drinking water became more and more polluted. This would have killed off people living in cities, but they drank beer instead of water. The alcohol killed off micro-organisms and made it possible for cities to grow.
My 3rd way of defining a natural product is that it is something that supports the ways our bodies heal themselves or keep themselves healthy naturally.
Using a whole food source for natural products delivers the ingredients in the food source that Nature put there. This is more natural than using extracts of whole food sources. But some products that claim to be whole food supplements may be misleading. They feed specific nutrients to various micro-organisms such as yeast. The yeast take up the nutrients and incorporate them into their cells. These yeast are then harvested and put into supplements. They boost the nutrient levels of the supplement because they have been fed high doses of nutrients. The source of the nutrients is then called a whole food. And that whole food is yeast.
The most natural foods… and herbs or other health products that come from Nature… are those that have not been changed by human intervention. They grow or are harvested from their native or natural habitat. They are the most natural because the foods or animals evolved to thrive in the habitats they are naturally found in. Wild plants or animals and raw minerals are the most natural sources of health products.
Such natural hormones have come to be called “bio-identical” hormones, which is probably a more accurate term. It’s more accurate because these hormones are identical to our own hormones, but they are not really naturally derived from natural sources. They may use an herb or plant material (e.g., wild yam or soy) as a raw ingredient to provide chemical substrates. But they are produced by genetically engineered microbes which process the raw material and turn out specific bio-identical hormones… a different hormone for each genetically modified microbe. This is a high tech laboratory process, even though it is often called fermentation as a way of making it seem more natural. Bio-identical hormones are not found in wild yams or soy, and they do not grow on trees or bushes.
By the 1970s most of the DDT used in the United States was banned. However, after that worldwide production and use increased.
How natural a product is and how natural a product we want to use depends on ourselves and how we use the product. If a neutraceutical is used as a drug substitute and if the consumer depends only on the neutraceutical to do the job for them, as they would depend on a drug to “fix” them without making any changes themselves, then such a use of a “natural” ingredient is less natural. Use of the same ingredient is more natural if used by someone who augments its use with diet and lifestyle changes, non-toxic living and a more natural life. The ingredient itself can have different degrees of how natural it is, depending on how it is used.
Toxins are a leading cause of illness and death throughout the world. In order to live a natural life or have natural health we need to protect ourselves from them. So devices that help us do that can be considered natural products because they help us to have a more natural environment. Such devices as air filters and water filters are natural products.
In fact there are two trends in the natural health product industry. One is a trend towards products whose ingredients are whole foods, herbs or minerals. The other trend is towards using more concentrated or isolated extracts from natural sources. A further extension of this trend (away from natural) is the use of synthetically made equivalents of natural ingredients.
That’s why I say that the most natural products come from the most remote, pure and pristine areas. One term used to describe such products is “beyond organic”. Although this term has several uses, in this case it refers to products that come from remote areas where contamination from local sources is minimal or absent. Sometimes such products are not certified organic and yet are still more pure than similar products that are certified organic. For example, glandular products from cattle raised in New Zealand, even though not certified organic, may be more pure and toxin-free than certified organic glandular products from cattle raised in the U.S. That’s because in New Zealand cattle are raised organically anyway. They are not allowed to be given feed or drugs, and they are range or grass fed. In addition, the remote New Zealand environment is generally more free of toxins than most places in the United States or other industrialized countries.
It is important to know where a product comes from and what the conditions are in the region it comes from, whether it is certified organic or not.
A specific issue of toxicity in natural health products has to do with ingredients that come from the oceans or bodies of fresh water. Many algae (spirulina, chlorella),[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], shellfish (krill oil, glucosamine) and fish (fish oil) products originally contain significant levels of heavy metals, pesticides, pcbs, dioxin, or other potent environmental toxins. While products from more remote areas may be less contaminated than products from more polluted areas, all ocean products are contaminated to some extent.
Supplements or devices that help us eliminate toxins from our bodies are also natural. Such products can range from detoxing neutraceuticals to saunas.
And what is it that’s so unnatural? For starters, there’s pollution: toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and particulates. There’s pollution everywhere, and no one can escape it completely. It’s in the air, the water, and the soil. It’s in our buildings, our food, our clothes, and our devices. It has spread across the whole planet.
As far back as there have been human beings, there has been the human use of foods, herbs and minerals for health purposes. The original natural use of healing substances was as foods, poultices, salves, teas, powders and baths. All indigenous peoples, both prehistoric and existing today, had or have an extensive knowledge of the medicinal properties of the animals, insects, minerals, leaves, herbs, flowers, roots, barks, fungi, molds and other natural substances in their ecosystem. Such materials were either used in their original state, or were dried, soaked, fermented or cooked in some way. This “primitive” or low-tech use of natural healing materials could be considered to be the most natural type of health products. Today such products exist in the form of herbal teas, dried herb powders, foods, juices, raw minerals and dried animal products.
1. 100% organic, meaning all ingredients are certified organic. Such products can use the USDA organic symbol and can say “100% organic” on the label.
Copyright 2011 by Shandor Weiss
Other kinds of bio-identical products have to do with the chemical form a product is in, e.g., if it is a trans or cis molecule, a right or left twisted molecule (levo or l-dopa, e.g.), or whether it is in one of many other forms of a bio-identical chemical makeup as opposed to a chemical form not found in our body.
The less a plant or animal has been hybridized over time, the more natural it is. The more ancient a strain of plant or animal, the more natural it is. The movement towards using heirloom varieties and ancient species is a step in the natural direction. For example, spelt is more natural than wheat even though both contain gluten, which many people need to avoid. Wild rice is more natural than other types of rice (even though wild rice is not really a rice species). Bison are more natural than cattle, because bison are still non-hybridized,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], wild animals. There were once wild cattle, but they have become extinct. Perhaps the Scottish Highlands cattle is the closest thing to wild cattle in existence now. At least it looks like it might be.
Let’s look the first definition of natural, in terms of Nature. This may be the most important way of defining what is natural. To begin with it’s pretty simple. We all have an intuitive understanding of what is natural when we think about Nature. For example, we know it is natural for the sun to rise and set and for there to be seasons. We know it is natural for migrating animals to migrate and for most plants to grow in light. We know that wolves are naturally carnivores, even if they do occasionally eat grass or berries. From this we infer that a dog’s natural diet should mostly be made up of food from animals. We understand that it is not natural for dogs or wolves to be vegetarians, while it is natural for herbivores like horses or bison to have a plant-based diet.
The higher up on the food chain one goes, the more concentrated the toxins become. So fish oil from sardines, e.g., is relatively less toxic than fish oil from cod, shark or salmon, which are larger and higher on the food chain.
Natural Definition 2: A Bio-Identical Definition
To be fair and honest, it can be very difficult to find a specific supplement that is certified as being organic. But it still seems like there is a disconnect among supplement users at all levels when it comes to using organic products. For example, a consumer may choose to purchase fresh or dried organic culinary herbs for the kitchen, while at the same time purchasing a non-organic herbal product for health purposes. People seem to feel or perceive that if it’s an herbal health product then it’s good for health, whether it’s organic or not. Of course, the herb itself may have health benefits just as many fruits and vegetables have health benefits. But if someone believes in eating organic produce they should also believe in using organic health supplements or herbs.
The next issue of how natural a product is has to do with how it is processed.
As a child growing up in New Jersey, I remember the trucks that went by every summer, spraying DDT to get rid of mosquitoes. In fact, we used to ride behind the trucks on our bikes, to cool off in the spray! That led to health problems later for me, and the spraying killed off the hundreds of ospreys that lived in the area. The ospreys returned eventually, and I learned how to detox from the DDT.
Similarly, growing plants in large mono-crop farms makes them more susceptible to plant diseases. So they have to be sprayed with pesticides. Commercial farms also use herbicides, antifungals, and other agricultural chemicals. Since living beings did not evolve with such chemicals, they are unnatural and unhealthy.
The public can often be lulled into thinking that fish products from wild or remote areas are more pure than other fish products. For example, some companies sell wild Alaskan salmon oil and promote the fact that their fish oil is from wild fish that live in what is believed to be a pristine environment. But many rivers in Alaska were once mined for gold, and they used mercury to extract the gold. These rivers still contain large levels of mercury toxicity. These are the same rivers that many wild Alaskan salmon spawn in and where the young salmon begin their lives. So are wild Alaskan salmon more toxin free than other salmon? It’s hard to know because it depends on which rivers they spawn in, and whether those rivers are contaminated from gold mining.
The same companies that made chemicals for warfare switched to making agricultural chemicals. In fact, one company, Ciba (now Ciba-Geigy) made chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and drugs. It was a perfect business: the agricultural chemicals made us ill, then we needed the drugs which the same company made.
As you can see, there is only one of four categories that are 100% organic. However, the organic symbol can be used on products with non-organic ingredients, as can labeling saying the product contains organic ingredients. While products with 95% and 70% or more organic ingredients are much better than products without organic ingredients, the labels can be confusing to consumers.
The common use of “natural” implies the ingredient or product comes from Nature, that it is not synthetic or man-made. But there is no consensus on how the term is used. This issue has come to the attention of the U.S. government which has been trying to figure out how to define and regulate use of the word “natural” in product labels and advertising. But the Food & Drug Administration,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies don’t know how to evaluate claims of products being natural. They’ve been working on it for many years and it will be many more years before there’s an official regulatory definition of what is natural. But even then it will only be a bureaucratic definition.
In the 1970s I visited the home of the Chairman of the Board of Ciba, which is based in Bern, Switzerland. I was travelling with my grandfather, who worked for Ciba. The Chairman showed us his backyard organic garden, of which he was very proud. I asked him why he had an organic garden and didn’t use his company’s products. He replied, “Oh, I wouldn’t use that stuff on my garden!” A common joke among Ciba executives was that running a large company is like growing mushrooms: you keep them all in the dark and give them plenty of manure.
What is meant by using the term “natural” to describe estrogen or progesterone is that the substance is the same as that found in our own body. In contrast, synthetic estrogens or progesterones have been chemically altered to be similar to, but not the same as, the hormones produced in our body. This is done so that drug companies can obtain a patent on the new chemical product, thus allowing them to sell it as a drug and make a lot of money from it. Drug companies cannot make much money selling hormones that are natural because there is no patent for them. Thus natural hormones are not generally promoted in the drug-medical community.
Conclusion
However, the criteria for organic certification of wild crafted products does not necessarily mean those products are free of synthetic chemicals. The same is true for farmed organic products. And here’s why:
After wild crafted, the next most natural source of products is from organic production. But there are varying degrees of organic. In the United States organic certification is now conferred by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and is certified by various certifying organizations that do the work for the government. There are 4 levels of organic certification:
At first, pesticides like DDT were touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Early DDT ads (in the late 1940s and early 1950s) encouraged people to spray it all over the yard and home, even on bowls of fruit and food in the kitchen, to keep flies off. I gave a lecture once to the annual convention of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians on environmental toxicity. While doing research for the talk I came across old magazine ads for DDT, showing people merrily spraying it all around their kitchen, home and yard.
Obviously, growing animals with artificial living conditions, unnatural feeds, hormones, antibiotics, and drugs is not natural.
Of course,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], concentrated forms of yeast are also used in baking and in fermenting alcoholic beverages. And there are nutritional supplements made entirely from brewer’s yeast. In fact brewer’s yeast was probably one of the original “natural” or “health” foods in the natural foods movement of the 60s and 70s. But whether eating concentrated yeast as a food is natural or not is debatable. It certainly was not part of our original hunter-gatherer diet. Whether yeast should be considered a whole food source of nutrients is also debatable.
Supplements are not the only way to improve or maintain health naturally. There are also many therapies and devices that support our natural healing process. Things that help us exercise, that provide heat or cold when needed, or that provide the right kinds of light or electromagnetic energy compatible with life are also natural health products. The product itself may not be natural,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], in that it is made of steel or plastic or electronic components or even chemicals. But the effect on the body is to promote natural self healing. Therefore this is another kind of definition of what is a natural health product.
Bio-identical products are considered “natural” from the point of view that they are the same substances naturally found or produced in our body, even though the source of the substance may not be natural. Calling the process fermentation also does not really qualify the product as coming from a natural source, since in most cases the micro-organisms that are doing the fermenting are biologically engineered. There are products made by natural fermentation but most bio-identical supplements are not a product of low-tech natural fermentation.
The time period that goes along with what is natural in Nature is important because it has to do with how evolution and natural selection works. Living things are in a constant state of maintaining balance with their ecosystems through adaptation and natural selection. Some changes may occur quite quickly, but the overall success of those changes can only be determined over a longer period of time. This evolutionary time period is shorter than geological time, and longer than our sense of human history.
So can we draw a line and say that everything on one side is natural, and everything on the other is not? From a purist evolutionary point of view we can, but from a pragmatic point of view it becomes more difficult. There are many degrees of natural and unnatural. It is like the story from the ancient Chinese sage, Lao Tzu. He was asked what a good man is and what a bad man is. He replied that a good man is someone who takes care of a less good man. A bad man is someone who is taken care of by a better man. There are infinite degrees of good and bad,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], natural and unnatural. What’s important is to move in the direction of more natural, and away from the direction of unnatural… wherever we are in the natural-unnatural continuum to begin with.
Mr. Natural
An enigmatic character who represents the dilemma of "natural" in our time.
Products that help us have natural lighting are natural. So are products that help us to sleep more naturally, such as organic beds, pillows and bedding. Even the right shoes can help us to walk and move more naturally. In fact, anything that neutralizes, protects or blocks unnatural influences and which restores a more natural state of balance is a natural health product.
Natural health or natural healing works through the normal physiological mechanisms that we all have for maintaining health. In the natural health paradigm health itself is the antidote, prevention and cure of disease. This is an important point. In contrast, in the drug/medical paradigm health is seen as the absence of disease. The goal of the drug or medical procedure is to stop or eliminate the disease, thus restoring the person to health… where health is seen as the absence of disease. The goal of natural healing is to restore health, thereby preventing or stopping or eliminating the disease. These are two very different approaches.
A similar process occurred with the development of making wine. It didn’t take long to make herbal or medicinal beverages with beer or wine... and later, with distilled alcohol beverages.
The natural prevention or elimination of disease by maintaining or restoring health, as opposed to the medical model of attacking disease, can be compared to different kinds of farming. Natural health is like organic farming, where the goal is to nourish the plants to make them so healthy that they resist pests and disease. The medical model is like commercial farming, where the goal is to use chemicals to protect the plants from pests and disease.
For one thing, there are no industry-wide or government regulated toxicity testing standards. Another problem is that many companies claim that their products are toxin free, but do not actually do the testing to confirm this claim. But even among the companies that do back up their testing with certified lab results, the tests themselves may not be sufficient or they may be misleading. For example, some companies certify that their products are pesticide free. But this doesn’t actually mean they are free of pesticides or that pesticides were not used on the crops used in the products. It means that the pesticide residues are below a certain threshold. What this threshold is depends on the lab and company doing the testing.
From a pragmatic point of view, both are. It depends on whether the herb’s properties are more enhanced by simple drying, or by freeze drying. Some herbs work better in their fresh state, but preserving them or distributing them to the market all year round in a fresh state is not practical or is impossible. So freeze drying creates the most natural product that can be marketed. Other herbs need to be dried to eliminate toxic or undesirable ingredients. So drying can also produce a more effective natural product.
Those who advocate for the whole food trend believe that products made from the entire food, herb or mineral source are more natural and thus better for health. For example, Vitamin C products that use whole foods like acerola cherries or camu camu berries to get their Vitamin C content are considered to be more natural than Vitamin C products that use Vitamin C extracted from plants, or that use laboratory synthesized Vitamin C. In fact it’s true that whole food sources of products are more natural, because that’s the form that people would naturally find and eat in a natural environment. In addition to being more natural, whole food sources may also be healthier because they contain many synergistic ingredients. Using Vitamin C as an example again, whole food sources of it also contain related and beneficial bioflavanaoids.
This step of standardizing whole food or herb products according to one or two specific ingredients is considered an improvement by most in the supplement industry. Standardization does have some benefits, but we feel there are hidden dangers in it, also. The danger is that standardization can lead to a perception or belief that the standardized ingredients are the only active ones in the product. This can lead to using the product as a natural type of drug. To say it another way, it allows the transference of a whole natural product used in a wholistic paradigm to an isolated ingredient from a natural product used in a drug/medical paradigm.
Natural Definition 1: An Evolutionary Definition
There is also a trend away from whole food sources towards more and more isolated and refined extracts of natural products. The first step in this direction is the identification of one or more key ingredients of a natural substance that supposedly has the desired health effect. Products are standardized to contain a specific quantity or percent of the key ingredient(s).
4. Less than 70% of ingredients are certified organic. No claims for being organic can be made on the packaging, but organic ingredients can be listed as such on the product’s ingredient label. The USDA organic symbol cannot be used.