The Nature Fallacy: Something is good because it is "natural" and bad because it is "unnatural.”
I have had to wrestle with this fallacy many times in my mind over the years. I started my training in the holistic wellness industry 20 years ago and have spent most of that time fervently believing that something is better because it’s natural and bad because it’s unnatural. Only in the last 5 years have I had the awareness and knowledge that life is just so much more nuanced than that.
It is too easy to get stuck in binary thinking - a hangover from our polarising understanding of Good and Evil. We love to point the finger at what is Evil because that makes life easier by taking the burden of responsibility off of us. But it is up to us, all of us, to take part in taking responsibility for our world. And that requires parsing apart the nuances of these seeming binaries of good and bad. The nature fallacy is our modern story of Good and Evil that we must all wrestle with in order to understand and move forward, leaving behind the long debunked untruths of the wellness industry while at the same time, protecting what is truly natural and good.
Naturally, living in a post-industrial, high-tech age we are yearning to be closer to nature and to cease the production of substances that harm ourselves and the environment. We are yearning to return to the basics - cleaning with baking soda and vinegar, refilling our pantry jars with raw wholefoods, and repairing holes in clothes with patches and colourful thread. However, some old ways are not progress. If we hold a blanket belief that returning to the old ways, in every way is good, then we are mistaken.
Myth #1 Raw Milk
It has become more popular to have raw milk because it’s more natural, and therefore good. Ignoring the fact that pasteurisation is a modern standard that prevents unnecessarily illness. Sure, most people may be able to tolerate it, but some people, especially those with compromised immune systems are at risk. And that is a common theme - in the fortunate world of those that can afford to seek wellness above and beyond mere survival - we are unaware of the minority groups that are at a greater disadvantage and rely on these modern standards to not get sick.
Myth #2 Sun Protection
Our sun is the greatest benevolent, life giving star that we have worshipped since time immemorial. However, we know all too well now that ongoing exposure causes our largest organ – our skin – to get thinner, weaker and frailer, and in worse case scenarios, kill us with cancerous growths. And yet, it seems unnatural to protect ourselves against such a life-giving force. There are countless wellness influencers that recommend sun exposure as a way of receiving life force, some call it vitamin D, but it should be known that covering up and wearing sunscreen does not cause vitamin D deficiency. We need such little exposure of sunlight in order to produce our daily dose of vitamin D. The only people really at risk of deficiency are shift workers or people with disorders that require extra supplementation.
Myth #3 Fluoride
There is an insidious conspiracy theory that fluoride is put into our communal water to dull our intellect and turn us into ‘sheeple’. In the wellness world little is understood about the social determinants of health and why these collective measures are put in place. It is the least privileged children that were showing up in dentist offices with the most cavities and having this small amount of fluoride in the water helps battle this. It is easy for us in privileged positions to say – stop feeding children sugary soda drinks that cause cavities, but it’s simply not that simple. And if you haven’t lived in poverty due to the misfortune of your place of birth or colour of your skin, then you are in no place to judge.
Myth #4 Vaccines
It seems taboo to talk about but it’s important that we do – vaccines seem unnatural, and therefore bad, because injections are invasive and feel aggressive. However, the origin of the vaccine is from the cow pox era where milkmaids had vastly lower instances of cowpox even though they were the most exposed. The word vaccine is from the Latin word ‘vacca’ for cow. It may seem more natural and therefore good that these milkmaids received natural immunity but (and this where the nature fallacy feels edgy, making us question what is unnatural anyway?) vaccines are our ingenious human way of pre-emptively acquiring natural immunity. It’s just that we need to get it through a syringe because applying the puss of a diseased animal to a wound is, shall we say, old fashioned. Is this old fashioned way better because it's more natural? Do we want to return to those ‘good ol’ days’? That's an easy - no.
The nature fallacy is a romantic notion but when we untangle all the threads of what is true, it’s not based on reality. Much of what we consider natural is actually barbaric and brutal – I’ll share my birth story another time. But it is my goal to bridge the gap between the wellness world and the medical world, making both better. There is no good side or bad side, there is a messy human spectrum of helpful and harmful. I believe we must get better at discussing the nuances in order to move beyond the polarising binaries and forward in our human evolution toward greater health and wellness for everybody.