A Guide To "Natural" Food

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a world where nature provides for us safe and tasty food to eat? Fruits and vegetables would grow for the sole purpose of providing yummy, healthy goodness for our hungry tummies. White fury rabbits would pounce across the stepping stones of the crystal clear creek, and happy flowers would… well, now I’m just being silly.
Humans are a recent addition to the ecology of the Earth, with bacteria arising 3500 million years ago, plants 438 million years ago, and insects 400 million years ago, mammals 200 million years ago. Humans arose only 2 million years ago. All living things on earth (besides for the aliens, and even with them, who knows) have been subject to the process of evolution. As Darwin put it, evolution is the “survival of the fittest.” The word “fittest,” however, does not equate to “healthiest for humans.” This fact is quite obvious when we are thinking about bacteria and viruses. Although many bacteria are beneficial to humans, we are well aware that there are strains of bacteria that we all wish would simply go away. As for viruses, the world might possibly be a happier place if they never existed in the first place. But they do. The viruses that have survived only do so because they continue to find new and ingenious ways to infiltrate plants and animal bodies, unfortunately to the detriment of those plants and animals.
With plants the distinction between good an evil becomes a little blurred. Some plant species survive only because insects or animals eat their fruit and propagate their seed or pollen. One only needs to look out our back window to see bees hovering over the daisy bush, or birds sipping some nectar, or your child pulling a lemon off the tree. But what about the other side of the coin? Putting aside propagation of a species, lets look at survival of an individual plant. The plants which will survive are the ones that find a way to fight off leaf-eating insects, to resist the roaming bacteria, to avoid succumbing to viri, to protect it from hungry animals, to develop defences. Just as a prickly cactus will deflect both monkeys and humans from stealing the nutritious flower, so too will the natural chemicals in parsnips and celery plants kill both insects and humans (granted, in large enough doses). One only needs to do a little reading to discover the plethora of dangerous substances that can be found in edible flora [1].


Organic Food

Wikipedia describes organic food as crops which have not been genetically modified, are given no man-made pesticides or artificial fertilizers, and which do not undergo preservative techniques such as ionising radiation or added preservatives. I believe many people who buy into (literally) the whole ‘organic’ hype are not doing much thinking for themselves [2]. Lets go through the facts, one by one.
No pesticides. This means that the plants have to either completely defend for themselves or be given an inferior natural pesticide (if it exists). Plants may not have any brains, but they’re not stupid. Their natural defences may increase if they are being attacked by insects, and unlike conventional pesticides which often degrade over time and reach the consumer at a very low level or only on the surface of the fruit which can be washed, the natural chemicals produced by the plant may not degrade, in turn reaching the consumer at high enough levels to do serious damage. Regular pesticides are heavily regulated to keep the level of chemicals reaching the consumer below a particular level to ensure safety, but organic foods can have no such regulations on the naturally made chemicals, making them all the more uncertain.
Preservatives. The long term effects of consuming added food preservatives is unknown but I would guess that the risk of ill health in eating something swarming with potentially harmful bacteria would be a lot higher than consuming moderate amounts of preservatives. For most substances for which high doses are detrimental to our health, small doses do not cause significant damage due to a threshold, a point at which the damage is so minor that we may live an entire lifetime before any effects become noticable. Humans are adaptive species with a naturally wide diet and I imagine that in order to try new foods we would have to be to some degree tolerant of toxins.
Not genetically modified. The entire pesticide issue could be avoided by using crops which have been genetically modified to repel insects but refrain from creating dangerous chemicals.
Irradiation. Food irradiation is another way to avoid pesticides and added food preservatives, as it may either prolong the shelf life or kill any bacterium or virus unfortunate enough to be making the produce home, depending on the dose of radiation. Just as light rays do not stay in our hand when we retract it from the sun, and x-rays do not stay within our teeth after we have been to the dentist, the gamma rays or x-rays used in food irradiation do not stay in the fruit when the radioactive source is removed. Thus the food does not become radioactive. It is a safe and well researched method [3].
In conclusion I would suggest anyone buying organic for the sake of being healthy should do a little research and see which organic products are safe. There may, however, be reasons other than this to buy orgainic, pesticide effects on the environment and farmers, for example.

Herbal Medicines

I'll only say two things about herbal medicines.
The first is this is this:
Plants have natural chemicals that can be dangerous to us. Herbs are plants.
And the second:
Beware!


[1] How To Poison Your Spouse The Natural Way by Jay D Mann
[2] Wikipedia
[3] Better Health Channel Website by the Victorian Government