[JulianMorrison]

Here's a hint for you. Natural does not mean healthy and without side effects. When you are eating a lifeform that contains myriads of chemicals in its purely natural makeup, you have no idea what you are eating. (Often, with herbal medicines, this proves to be an issue, and they get yanked off sale for side effects.) Ironically, it is precisely the synthetic chemicals that you can look up on wikipedia. And if you live long enough, immersed in this flow of entirely natural chemicals and radiation, yourself made of complicated and imperfect chemical reactions, you too will get cancer. (Actually, your body is cancering (deliberate verb coinage) all the time, and nearly always its repair mechanisms catch it early and stop it. It's that "nearly" that's the trouble.)

But hey, facts, harder to process than irrational fear of the new, and a crude prescientific search for "purity".

[praxeologist]

Natural doesn't even mean natural, especially in the US. Europe has a middle ground between natural and artificial flavorings called "nature identical", but in the US these can just be called natural.

Personally, I don't have a problem with this, but most people don't realize it or other things like how that 100% natural, not from concentrate orange juice is really made.

Also, for "organic" fruit and other foods, maybe that matters, but flavorings and other ingredients only have a requirement to be 95%+ organic content. One company I know of sells flavorings that are mostly organic water/alcohol/other diluents, but then the other 5% can be anything and you only need very small amounts of concentrated flavorings which can be anything "nature identical".

[adrianN]

That is not a very convincing argument. We have evolved eating other lifeforms. That makes it much more likely that our bodies know how to handle the chemicals in plants and animals than the fancy colourings, preservatives and flavours in processed food.

[biofox]

Would you be confident foraging for food in our "natural" environment?

A great deal of plants, fungi, nuts, and fruits are highly toxic. Even staples like rice and fish have high levels of naturally occurring arsenic and lead; and most table spices are lethal in high quantities.

On top of that, there are countless carcinogens, allergens, pathogenic bacteria and parasites in the food chain.

There is a reason lifespan has been increasing.

[6d0debc071]

No, that's true - natural doesn't mean healthy and without side effects. But it's at least relatively well understood. Perhaps not in exact chemical makeup but we've co-existed with most of what's in a supermarket long enough to know it's probably not going to cut our lifespans in half or anything.

Suddenly people are making extremely rapid changes to food and it's not unreasonable for people to be cautious about it.