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‘All Natural’

Manufacturers’ Phony Guarantees

No Guarantee

By Mike Adams

       W hen you’re shopping for groceries, watch out for the phrase “all natural’ as claimed on the front of various product packages. It turns our that the phrase “all natural’ can mean just about anything; it actually has no nutritional meaning whatsoever and isn’t truly regulated by anyone.

 This came to light recently when I wrote about autolyzed yeast extract containing MSG. I was contacted by the manufacturer of a popular “veggie burgers product who claimed that my article was incorrect, that their product didn’t contain MSG, and that they used nothing but all-natural ingredient &  I replied by reading their PR person the list of ingredients printed right on their own box, which included autolyzed yeast extract. I then showed them documentation supporting the fact that autolyzed yeast extract always contains MSG, and that autolyzed yeast extract is used for only one purpose in manufactured foods: as a chemical taste enhancer. It has no other purpose in the realm of food science.

 At this point the spokesperson for this veggie burger manufacturer admitted that, yes, their product did contain free glutamic acid, which is another way of saying MSC, but that it was from an aI1-naturaI source, and that there are other foods like seaweed or tomatoes that have free glutamic acid. Sure, tomatoes have a very small quantity of naturally occurring Free glutamic acid, but that’s different. What the veggie burger manufacturer is doing is using an MSG ingredient in a concentrated, refined form that greatly increases the potency and the potential toxicity of the ingredient. In my book, that’s not natural,          

 Claiming MSC is natural because free glutamic acid appears in tomatoes is sort of like saying cocaine is natural because it’s derived from ingredients found in the coca leaf.  Of course, it’s all a matter of potency—you can take a natural plant like coca and eat coca leaf all day long in Peru without any of the dangerous or addictive effects of cocaine. And if you’re hiking in the Andes, you’ll be very glad if you drink coca leaf tea, because trying to keep up with the locals, who scramble up steep hillsides as easily as strolling along a paved sidewalk, is nearly impossible without some invigorating help from the local plants.  Coca leaf tea is not a drug, but when you take the active constituents of the coca tea and you refine them into a highly concentrated format then you get cocaine.  That’s when it becomes a problem. The same thing is true with MSG. If you’re eating sea-weed, that’s not a problem for your health; in fact sea-weed is very good for you and it’s now been shown to actually prevent and even help treat cancer.   But if you take MSG out of seaweed or you synthesize MSG and put it into a highly concentrated form then it functions as a neurotoxin—that’s why it’s called an excitotoxin by Dr. Russell Blaylock, who is perhaps the world’s foremost authority on MSG and other excitotoxins such as aspartame.

 Similarly whole grain corn is a healthful, nutritious food. But when you refine that corn and extract the sugars to make high-fructose corn syrup you now have a blatantly unnatural ingredient that contributes to obesity and type-ll diabetes. Yet the corn associations insist that high-fructose corn syrup is “aIl natural” because it comes from a plant.

The point is that a food manufacturer can take anything that occurs somewhere in nature and refine it to increase the potency by 1,000 times or more, and then claim that their product is “all natural,~ In other words, if cocaine were legal, they could put crack cocaine in their veggie burgers and call that all natural too. In fact they can scrounge up just about anything found on the planet, whether it’s heavy metals like mercury or arsenic, or refined sugars made from beets or corn, and they can put those in their foods and call it all natural.

 Of course, it’s all quite ridiculous. By that definition, anything derived from plants, animals Or elements found on planet Earth could earn the “all natural” label. The key is in understanding that it’s the process that’s unnatural not the source, When you chemically or structurally alter food ingredients into a form that no longer appears anywhere in nature, it’s no longer natural, folks.         Regardless of what the food manufacturers claim.

                 Mike Mains is a wholistic nutritionist with over 4,000 hours of study on nutrition, wellness, food toxicology and the causes of disease and health. Adams’s hooks include The Seven Laws of Nutrition, The Five Soft Drink Monsters and Superfoods for Optimum Health.        

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