Is the 100 Percent Natural Label 100 Percent Misleading?

So what does nat­ural mean? Well, that depends on who you’re ask­ing. A sales­per­son in the meat depart­ment at Shoprite in Chester, N.Y., told me that Tyson’s all nat­ural chicken is “basi­cally the same thing” as organic. At General Mills, 100 per­cent nat­ural means “that all ingre­di­ents used are from a nat­ural source and a nat­ural process,” though when I asked for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on what counts as a “nat­ural process,” the cus­tomer ser­vice agent was out of answers.

According to Rachel Saks, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based nutri­tion con­sult­ing com­pany tABLE health, for her health-conscious clients, nat­ural “means what­ever they want it to mean.” Clients with high blood pres­sure, for exam­ple, “tend to inter­pret nat­ural as good for their blood pres­sure, maybe not too high in salt.” Clients look­ing to lose weight, mean­while, read the claim to mean the food is low-calorie. “It solves what­ever prob­lem they want to solve.”

With all of these dis­parate inter­pre­ta­tions of a once-straightforward word, it may come as a sur­prise that there is, at least on prin­ci­ple, some offi­cial gov­ern­ment guid­ance to how the word should be used.

What con­fuses most peo­ple, how­ever, is that the two agen­cies that reg­u­late food in this country—the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—have very dif­fer­ent approaches to the term.

A meaty approach

The USDA, which is tasked with reg­u­lat­ing meat and poul­try, says that a prod­uct is “nat­ural” if it con­tains “no arti­fi­cial ingre­di­ent or added color and is only min­i­mally processed. Minimal pro­cess­ing means that the prod­uct was processed in a man­ner that does not fun­da­men­tally alter the product.”

As lit­tle as this def­i­n­i­tion really tells us, Stephen Gardner, direc­tor of lit­i­ga­tion for the Center of Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), says it beats the FDA’s def­i­n­i­tion hands down. “Meat is an easy one. Natural, at a min­i­mum, should be what you get off the cow, or the pig, or the chicken. It shouldn’t be treated.” And for the most part, that is what nat­ural means when used on meat prod­ucts. It says noth­ing about what hap­pened to the ani­mal before slaugh­ter, what it was fed or treated with while alive (read: GMO corn or grass, antibi­otics or not), or under what kinds of con­di­tions it was raised. But it does mean that between the slaugh­ter­house and the super­mar­ket, noth­ing was added or done to it. (Gardner notes that there are some out­liers that seem to have escaped the USDA’s eye, like chicken that is pumped with salt water to give it a health­ier appear­ance and bet­ter taste.)

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