Perceived chemical-ness is a very rough heuristic for the degree of optimization a food has undergone for being sold in a modern economy (see http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ for why this might be something you want to avoid). Very, very rough—you could no doubt list examples of ‘non-chemicals’ that are more optimized than ‘chemicals’ all day, as well as optimizations that are almost certainly not harmful. And yet I’d wager the correlation is there.
Perceived chemical-ness is a very rough heuristic for the degree of optimization a food has undergone for being sold in a modern economy (see http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ for why this might be something you want to avoid). Very, very rough—you could no doubt list examples of ‘non-chemicals’ that are more optimized than ‘chemicals’ all day, as well as optimizations that are almost certainly not harmful. And yet I’d wager the correlation is there.