Reply #172: Don't you know? Artificial = BAD, Natural = GOOD!

[Silent3]

You can't explain how silly that is without someone freaking out that you're whitewashing all of the real problems in our food supply, however.

Anecdotes and personal stories are practically worthless here. We need longitudinal studies of the health of diverse groups consuming various diets, including things like life expectancy and health care costs.

Life expectancy is much longer today than it was 200 years ago when "natural" and "locally-grown" was all there was to eat, when hardly anyone was "suffering" from the apparent evils of (gasp!) vaccination and Big Pharma "poisons". We owe a lot of that increase in life span to better sanitation and the sheer increase in available food (from borderline starvation to, at least for Americans and much of the industrialize world, glut), but clearly it's not like we're doing everything wrong now, or that "natural" and "locally-grown" have ever automatically produced trim, fit healthy centenarians.