Nature Isn’t Trying to Save You
I’m sure some of you have seen or heard some wellness influencer saying something along the lines of “go back to nature.” They say we should stop eating anything synthetic, avoid the seed oils, and to trust the wisdom of the Earth. They conflate safe with natural.
But nature doesn’t care if we live or die. It’s not curating some gentle life on easy-mode for us. Nature gave us plenty of dangers to content with on a daily basis. UV sunlight, poison ivy, mosquitos, and arsenic are all “natural.” Natural doesn’t mean safe. And something being natural certainly doesn’t make it automatically better than a synthetic alternative.
An example of this thinking can be found in pesticides. Many people think organic food is grown with no pesticides, but that’s not the case. They’re farmed with “organic” pesticides. The problem is, they can be more dangerous than their synthetic counterparts. Take the example of rotenone, a pesticide derived from plants and used in organic farming. It’s touted as a natural alternative to synthetic chemicals. It’s also highly toxic. Its LD50 (the dose at which 50% of lab animals are killed) is between 25-132 mg/kg1.
The synthetic alternative to rotenone has an LD50 of >5,0002. That alternative? Glyphosate, a pesticide that has been demonized by the likes of RFK Jr. for decades. The kicker is that glyphosate is at least 40-200 times less acutely toxic than rotenone. It also has a much lower dermal and inhalation toxicity in mammal studies, while rotenone was pulled from the market in Europe over concerns about Parkinson’s-like neurotoxicity in rodents.
But according to certain influencers, glyphosate is a “toxic poison from Monsanto” while rotenone is a “clean, plant based solution.” That’s all vibes. The idea that “natural” means safe and “synthetic” means harmful can feel intuitive. But it’s often very wrong. (More on the organic grift coming soon.)
This is the kind of thinking that philosophers (and some public health folk) call the naturalistic fallacy. I try to dodge the word fallacy most of the time because it just gives off the tone of a Reddit or Twitter debate thread. But it is a logical error that creeps into health conversations constantly.
Nature Gave Us Butter, Right? (Not Quite)
Let’s talk about another common dichotomy put forward by the naturalist side. They’ll claim seed oils are bad and butter/tallow is good. There’s even a common phrase thrown around with it commonly attributed to Michael Pollen: “if your great-grandma wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it.”
According to this view, seed oils like sunflower, soybean, or canola are dangerous industrial products. They’re deemed unnatural products that were previously used as machine lubricants. Butter/tallow, meanwhile, are praised as a wholesome, traditional natural fat.
A couple funny things to note. First, tallow was also used as a machine lubricant. That’s not unique to seed oils. Second, you can cold-press oil directly from many seeds! That’s how olive oil, canola oil, and sunflower oil are obtained. If it’s the mechanical effort that makes these somehow inherently dangerous, why doesn’t the same apply on their side? It takes effort to milk a cow and further processing to turn that milk into butter. You have to separate it and churn it at minimum.
So why is one considered natural and the other some industrial waste product? Because natural doesn’t mean “minimal processing” to these people. It means familiar. It’s a nostalgia test at best and definitely not a metric of “healthiness” for a product.
BTW, butter has a far higher saturated fat content than most seed oils. So for those concerned about heart disease, we’ve got decades of outcome data showing that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats (like those in seed oils) reduces risk. People can quibble all they want with these being observational studies, but the evidence is strong and metabolic ward studies show things in the same direction3,4. This doesn’t make seed oils magical, but they’re sure as hell not poison.
Why It Feels Right (Even When It’s Wrong)
We’ve seen that natural doesn’t necessarily mean good. It doesn’t hold up to toxicology, history, or logic, so why does this belief stick around? Why is it so compelling to so many people?
Honestly, I think it’s because vibes are powerful. When something comes from a farm we imagine dirt, grass, and milkmaids with clear skin (Fun fact: the first vaccine came from milkmaids who didn’t get smallpox because they’d caught cowpox in the past. Natural immunity, sure. But the moment science got involved and turned that into a vaccine, people called that unnatural.) On the other hand, when something comes from a lab, we imagine beakers, bubbling liquids, people in white coats, and their diseased animal subjects. Never mind the fact that plenty of life saving drugs like penicillin were derived from plants and synthesized to make them safer or more effective.
This gets at the epistemic laziness at the heart of this. They promote a shortcut of “if it’s synthetic, be afraid. If it’s natural, embrace it.” Don’t read the studies or weigh tradeoffs. Just pick the team that aligns with your identity. If you think modern medicine is corrupt and nature has all the answers, it’s not a far cry from joining the raw milk crew. It becomes an act of rebellion. But it’s just misinformation built on vibes, gut feelings, and a lot of anti-institutional resentment.
So What Should We Trust?
If you’re going to make health decisions, don’t base them on vibes when we have outcome data. Familiar doesn’t mean healthy, old doesn’t mean wise, and natural doesn’t mean safe. Plenty of things in nature will kill you and plenty of synthetic things won’t. Same goes for the reverse. But that’s the nuanced world we live in.
Citations
1. Rotenone - IDLH | NIOSH | CDC. March 6, 2020. Accessed May 19, 2025. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/83794.html
2. Glyphosate Technical Fact Sheet. August 28, 2015. Accessed May 19, 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20150828151524/http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/glyphotech.html
3. Clarke R, Hopewell JC. Abstract 18256: Importance of Controlling Dietary Intake of Saturated Fat for Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease: Lessons From the Metabolic Ward Studies. Circulation. 2011;124(suppl_21):A18256-A18256. doi:10.1161/circ.124.suppl_21.A18256
4. Clarke R, Frost C, Collins R, Appleby P, Peto R. Dietary lipids and blood cholesterol: quantitative meta-analysis of metabolic ward studies. BMJ. 1997;314(7074):112-117. doi:10.1136/bmj.314.7074.112