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Are “natural” products always better for us?
The short answer is no, but the real answer is longer and more interesting than that.
The obvious point to make first is that plenty of natural things are incredibly harmful. Some forms of radiation are natural. Poisons like arsenic and cyanide are naturally occurring and many plants are toxic, including the berries of the potato plant and common garden plants like spurge (I dug all mine up when I read that one berry from a spurge plant could “kill a child”). But the idea that something natural is better than something inorganic is an old idea – as old as the process of synthesising chemicals, which was invented a couple of hundred years ago (although, arguably, all sorts of natural processes are a form of synthesis – all living things are constantly making one thing out of another thing for our own benefit).
Plus, it’s the dose that makes the poison. Some things are good for us in small doses but can harm us in large amounts (aspirin, alcohol, salt) and even some of the things which are essential for human life can kill us if we take them to excess – water is natural but drink too much of it and that can kill you, too. Even excessive oxygen can do you in. Lots of so-called unnatural or synthetic things are good for us, like synthetic hormones, or make our lives better, easier or safer (while others are more problematic).
The language that beauty brands, the wellness industry and even the food industry uses to promote and market their products to us is fascinating, and – apart from the word “organic”, which does have legal status – also almost totally unregulated. Led by marketeers, the word “natural” has become a by-word for products that won’t do harm and will do us good, and is appended to all sorts of personal care products, from shampoos made with sodium lauryl sulfate (which is synthetic, not natural) to mascaras made with polyurethane-2 (which is a type of flexible plastic) or hair spray containing hydroxyacetophenone (a synthetic antioxidant and preservative).
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