Food marketing degree

Admit it. If, right now, you could bite down on a crispy, crunchy potato chip that was "natural" and therefore good for you, you'd do it, right?

Thought so. Makers of potato chips--and corn chips, pancake mixes, frozen waffles, frosted breakfast cereals, ice cream and other taste tempters--think so too. That's why the word "natural" appears so frequently on food packages these days. Marketing experts know that, for many consumers, natural equals healthful, and that healthful sells.

In fact, the word "natural" on a food package may mean next to nothing because--unlike "organic"--"natural" has no meaning in law or regulation. For these reasons, the use of "natural" on food products all too often distracts attention from more important considerations.

"Natural" may even be misleading if it implies that a product is free of chemical additives (often not the case) or that competitors' products are "unnatural and therefore bad for you.

Some additives, such as vitamins and minerals, are beneficial, making it easier to get certain nutrients--think of fortifying OJ with calcium. And preservatives keep foods from spoiling, which is good, as long as the preservatives themselves are not harmful or exist in too great quantity. Salt, for example, is a preservative.

"People have come to think that 'natural' is synonymous with healthful, which isn't necessarily true," says Melina Beth Jampolis, MD, a San Francisco-based member of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians--specialists in treating obesity. "Salt is natural, but too much of it is bad for you."

On the other hand, some forms of "unnatural" processing, such as pasteurizing milk to kill bacteria, yield huge health benefits.

Poetic License

"Obviously, there is a lot of poetic license taken with the way foods are advertised," Jampolis adds. In fact, advertisers can make virtually any claim they want about how natural their products are, with two exceptions.

The first is when the word is used in connection with flavors. In that case, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines a natural flavor as one that is derived "from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf" or similar plant (or even animal) material.

The second exception, irrelevant to vegetarians, involves the use of the word "natural" in meat and poultry products. The US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service allows the word to be used on minimally processed meat and poultry products with no artificial ingredients or added colors.

"Most people think natural is good and artificial is bad, but nutritionally, that's also not always the case," says Robert Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, food columnist for The Washington Post and author of What Einstein Told His Cook." Kitchen Science Explained.

Almost all foods today are processed in some way, and unless you are able to buy exclusively from a farmers' market or grow your own fruits and vegetables, much of what you eat has seen the inside of a lab, factory or high-tech warehouse. Food science has become so sophisticated that it can be difficult to know where natural ends and unnatural begins.

Classic Example

Tomatoes are the classic example. "They are routinely picked green and then gassed with ethylene, a plant hormone that encourages them to ripen and become red," Wolke says. "This can be seen as an artificial process done to speed up the ripening that ordinarily would take place anyway. And the chemical content of the tomato doesn't change as a result, so is it natural or not? That's impossible to say." The flavor, of course, is another matter.

Even to produce what the FDA would consider a natural flavor, Wolke explains, takes a great deal of work in a lab or factory. "You can process almonds to extract almond flavor, which is benzaldehyde. Or you can manufacture benzaldehyde in a lab with much less effort. But the chemical compound you end up with in both cases is identical, so it is difficult to say what makes the 'artificial' almond flavor 'unnatural.'"

Most people think they know what "natural" means, however, and they shop accordingly. A January 2002 study by the Washington, DC-based National Consumers League (NCL) found that 76 percent of those surveyed believed that foods with "natural" on the package should contain at least 90 percent natural ingredients; 80 percent said "natural" products were "good for them." However, as NCL President Linda Golodner said when the study was released, "products with the 'natural' labeling are not required by law to contain only natural ingredients."

Unsuspecting Consumers

When unscrupulous marketers exploit such expectations, they manipulate unsuspecting health-conscious consumers, making it more difficult for them to make intelligent choices among products.

These marketers also cast doubt on the well-founded claims made by the hundreds of food companies, most rather small, whose commitment to using natural ingredients is genuine. That is unfortunate because many of their products come about as close as possible to what you'd pick from a backyard garden, find at a roadside farm stand or--with flour and other grain-based products--buy at a water-powered gristmill.

Cynical marketers would not be able to succeed if it weren't for wishful thinking on the part of shoppers, however. They prey, after all, on consumers who make unwarranted assumptions about what "natural," "organic" and other terms mean.

"One misconception is that products containing organic ingredients are also natural, meaning, in this case, having no artificial ingredients," says Melanie Polk, RD, director of nutrition education for the American Institute for Cancer Research, also in Washington, DC. "There are breakfast cereals made front organically grown wheat with raisins made from organically grown grapes. But the cereal itself can have lots of preservatives. Or it may contain lots of added salt and sugar, which are natural, but in the quantities that you find in many breakfast cereals, they're not healthful."

Even natural and organic foods require some degree of processing. "You can harvest organically grown wheat, but you still have to take it to a Factory to turn it into wheat flakes, and then add salt and sugar to it to make it a palatable product," Wolke says. "Is it organic? Yes. Is it natural? Well, no."

Finally, indisputably natural foods--most of the items in the fresh fruit and vegetable aisles--aren't always the most nutritious choice. If they're even somewhat past their peak, a comparable product from the frozen food section is likely to be healthier. "You never know for sure how long fruits and vegetables have been on the shelf or even on the truck or in a warehouse," Polk says. "Fruits and vegetables lose nutritional value over time. If they are fresh when you bring them home, be sure to eat them within 3 or 4 days of purchase, or they will have lost so much of their nutritional value that you'd have been better off buying them frozen."

Most fruits and vegetables today are flash-frozen, meaning frozen at extremely low temperatures at harvest. "That process stops the degeneration of nutrients completely until the fruit or vegetable is thawed out," Wolke explains.

Dietary Downfall

The most useful question may be not whether a food is natural (however that's defined) or even fresh, but whether it contains the nutrients you seek--or whether it doesn't contain the additives you want to avoid.

To figure that out, the nutrition facts on the back of a package are always more revealing than advertising claims on the front. Shopping intelligently also means developing a healthy skepticism about your own capacity for self-deception when beckoned by a big bag of chips. (Or what ever your personal dietary downfall may be.)

Natural potato chips, after all, are still potato chips. Even if all they have in them are organically grown potatoes, sea salt and peanut oil, they're still not going to be good for your heart--or your waistline.

What's 'Organic' Mean?

* "Organic" and "natural" do not mean the same thing. "Organic," under the definition adopted by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), refers only to the methods by which food is grown, handled and processed and provides no assurance that food that meets USDA organic standards is more nutritious than food that does not. "Natural," when applied to fruits and vegetables, has not been assigned a regulatory definition by the USDA.