Source: ntoper, CC BY, via Flickr
Shopping for healthy food can be confusing, when it comes to the terms used on labels, but there is quite a big difference between natural and organic foods. Both of those terms sound nice and healthy, but you need to look into things a little deeper to truly understand what it is you’re about to consume. By the end of this article you will know the exact type of food you want to aim to eat, in order to stay as healthy as possible.
The Short Answer…
If you want the short answer to the question in the title, then the answer is NO! If that’s all the convincing you need then I understand if you want to stop reading now. But if you want to know why I say that, then continue reading to help boost your knowledge of food.
You see, there are no real regulations as to what you can call natural or all natural, but there are plenty of standards for food that is referred to as organic, as you probably read in my last article on organic food. So, it’s really hard to say that a product that claims to be “all natural” is anywhere near as healthy as something that says it’s “100% organic”.
You could pack a ton of “natural” ingredients in a product but put them through processes that ruin the healthy qualities of the food, and that would be perfectly legal. But there are strict guidelines in place that dictate what you can call 100% organic, organic or made with organic ingredients.
So, What’s the Difference?
Source: Horia Varlan, CC BY, via Flickr
And if you want to get into the details, then let’s do just that… Calling your food natural or saying that it has natural ingredients really just means that they came from nature or they exist in nature, and weren’t created in some lab somewhere. And sure, that also means that it wasn’t processed with preservatives or additives, like artificial colors or flavors, but that same food could have been grown with toxic pesticides. 100% organic food is not.
In fact, natural food doesn’t have to be certified as natural and no one really looks into these claims, but with organic food you have to. Heck, so-called “natural” food can be genetically modified and have lovely traces of growth hormones in it. 100% organic food cannot. And, when you compare animal products, there are some big differences there as well. With organic food, there are requirements on how you raise and feed your animals, but there are no requirements for natural foods. When raising “natural food”, you don’t have to feed your animals organic food, you don’t have to let them roam around outside and you can pump them full of antibiotics and growth hormones. You can’t do any of that with 100% organic animal products!
Are you starting to see the difference? Natural claims on food really don’t mean much of anything at all, but organic food (especially 100% organic food) has such a strict certification process that the quality of the food is almost guaranteed. So, when faced with a decision to choose between a natural product and an organic product, which would you rather?
