‘Natural is better,’ my ass!

I want to help clar­ify this idea that chem­i­cals are “bad,” or that nat­ural sub­stances are “good.”

Pretty much all mat­ter in this world can be bro­ken down to its chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion.  The sug­ars, fats, pro­teins and nucleic acids you ingest every day are chem­i­cals. They are the build­ing blocks for every­thing that is made up in your body.

Call­ing some­thing a “chem­i­cal” does not mean it is arti­fi­cial or nasty.  Water and air are chem­i­cals.  An all organic apple is 100% chemicals.

In fact, when you TASTE some­thing, what you are tast­ing is the actual chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion of the food.

Your taste buds are known as chemore­cep­tors, mean­ing that they lit­er­ally trans­form chem­i­cal sig­nals in food into elec­tri­cal sig­nals in the body.  This also applies to your sense of smell, by the way, but let’s just focus on taste.

Here’s a quick, sim­pli­fied run-down:

Sweet

What we call sweet is any sugar (car­bo­hy­drate) that acti­vates the sweet-chemoreceptors.

For exam­ple: Glu­cose, fruc­tose and galac­tose are all made up of 6 car­bon atoms, 12 hydro­gen atoms and 6 oxy­gen atoms. (C₆H₁₂O₆)

Sour

Sour things are acti­vated by acids. An acid is any­thing that, when mixed with water, releases hydro­gen ions (H+).

Exam­ples: Cit­ric acid in lemon­ade and lac­tic acid found in many foods such as yogurt, sour cream, but­ter­milk, etc.

Salty

What we call salty are salts. The def­i­n­i­tion of a salt is a com­bi­na­tion of a metal and a nonmetal.

Exam­ples:

• Table salt is Sodium Chlo­ride (NaCl, Na=metal, Cl=nonmetal).
• Potas­sium chlo­ride, com­monly used as an elec­trolyte replen­isher, is a salt.
• Sodium Iodide, com­monly found in iodized-salt, is a salt.

Bit­ter

What we call bit­ter are usu­ally nitroge­nous organic mol­e­cules (mol­e­cules that con­tain lots of car­bon and nitro­gen). Many poi­sons found in nature are bit­ter and it’s sur­mised that evo­lu­tion­ary speak­ing, we have ended up with a very low thresh­old for bit­ter­ness due to that reason.

Exam­ples: If you’ve ever put an aspirin tablet in your mouth, it’s very bit­ter. It orig­i­nally came from the bark of a wil­low tree but is syn­the­sized in a lab now. It’s actu­ally the first syn­thetic drug ever pro­duced! Unsweet­ened cocoa is another exam­ple of an organic mol­e­cule. Caf­feine is as well but many peo­ple have got­ten used to it (or deal with it by adding sugar).

Umami

Umami is a loan word for “pleas­ant savory taste” and is often asso­ci­ated with meat, which is almost entirely pro­tein.  Amino acids are the build­ing blocks for protein.

Fif­teen years ago a group of Japan­ese researchers dis­cov­ered these umami-chemoreceptors which are specif­i­cally acti­vated by amino acids, such as L-glutamate.

Exam­ples: Fish, shell­fish, cured meats, mush­rooms, toma­toes, spinach, cheeses.

What was the point of all this, Anto!?

The pur­pose of these chemore­cep­tors are to inform us of the pres­ence of sug­ars, acids, salts, organic com­pounds and amino acids in our foods. Food is some­thing exter­nal that is going to become inter­nal, so we bet­ter have a sense of what we’re putting in our body.  For exam­ple, if you drink some milk and it tastes really sour, that informs us that it’s gone bad and we could spit it out.

I hope that dri­ves the point that…

• Chem­i­cals are not just sub­stances in lab­o­ra­to­ries. Every­thing you can see, smell, hear, taste and touch are prob­a­bly made up of chemicals.
• There’s no such thing as a chemical-free sham­poo, makeup, deodor­ant, or sunscreen.
• Just because some­thing is syn­thet­i­cally made, doesn’t mean it’s auto­mat­i­cally bad for you.
• And just because some­thing is “nat­ural” doesn’t mean it’s auto­mat­i­cally good for you. There are plenty of plants and ani­mals that could kill you if you ingested them.

What isn’t a chemical?

Dreams aren’t chem­i­cals. Day­dreams too, for that mat­ter, although they may be caused by chem­i­cals.

Energy isn’t a chem­i­cal either. Light, sound, heat, elec­tric­ity and mag­netic fields are all forms of energy, and just like dreams, prob­a­bly caused by chemicals.

But Anto! When I say chem­i­cal, I mean the BAD-chemicals!

Well then, why don’t you be a lit­tle more spe­cific next time and tell us which ones you’re talk­ing about?  Say­ing some­thing is a chem­i­cal, isn’t adding any value to the dis­cus­sion.  It’s like say­ing this water is really, really wet.

Think for your­self.  Make your own deci­sions.  Grab a pack­age from your kitchen.  Read the ingre­di­ents.  Google what every­thing is in the list.  Find out what it is, its pur­pose and in what quan­tity is it con­sid­ered bad for you?  The ingre­di­ents listed first, are the ones with the great­est amount and fol­low­ing in descend­ing order, are those in smaller amounts.

Hope that helps clar­ify some things!!!