Several have commented in this thread about the higher levels of pesticides or other contaminants in 'natural' foods than in processed.  I think that in some ways, that is a strawman argument.  

I'll grant that there are a few 'true believers' who are impervious to evidence or who, as Allen said, can't tell the difference between ppb and ppm.  However, at least some of the detractors of processed foods base their objection on the imperfectability of human knowledge.  

It's easy to say that processed food is more pure than natural but you can not say definitively that it is more wholesome unless you already know absolutely everything about the organism's nutritional needs, including trace nutrients, sympathetic interactions, balance, lifecycle timing, etc.  If you attempt to impose a more pure but artificial diet in the absense of complete information, you take the risk of doing more harm than good through the omission of some as-yet-unknown factor.

A more natural diet, on the other hand, will have the right balance and components almost by definition since it is the diet that the organism evolved to optimize.  (This, of course, assumes a definition of "natural" in a biological/evolutionary sense and not necessarily the definition used in the quasi-religious sense of the true-believer minority mentioned above.)

The presumption that natural is better can be rebutted by hard evidence (the comparative study on sugar vs nectar-based honey as winter feed comes to mind) but even that conclusion can be trusted only to the limits of the study.  Being better as winter feed, for example, does not prove that it would stay better if imposed continuously.

I don't know the motivation of the author of the BeeCulture article that was cited a few posts back.  But I don't think that attributing a dogmatic motivation to all supporters of natural foods is supportable.

Mike Rossander



      

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