It means that the natural food industry is facing a massively constrained optimisation problem.
Define “massively”?
To the best of my (admittedly relatively ignorant) knowledge:
The worst generally acknowledged culprits for dietary promotion of disease are sugars and trans fats. Sugars are easy to add in arbitrary quantities in “all natural” form.
The worst remaining likely culprits for dietary promotion of disease are salt, nitrates/nitrites, and excesses of many other fats (likely everything except omega-3 and monounsaturated fatty acids in the average modern diet?). These are all easy to add via “all natural” ingredients.
The worst still-controversial suspected culprits for dietary promotion of disease are high-carb diets and high dietary cholesterol; both of these are easy to add via “all natural” sources.
We obviously don’t know nearly as much as we should about nutrition as we should. The big Mediterranean diet study showing 50+% reduction in cardiovascular incidents was only a decade ago, and the study narrowing most of that down to nuts and olive oil was just a year ago! But it seems that we know enough to say that there are ways to make food much more immediately satisfying and much less healthy without using any ingredients that wouldn’t have been available throughout human history; all we have to do is use too much of some of them. All-natural diets scored a big victory in the case of trans fats, and may avoid similar artificial food mistakes in the future too, but the worst natural ingredients seem to be much worse for you than the best artificial ingredients, so simply avoiding the latter isn’t a panacea.
Define “massively”?
To the best of my (admittedly relatively ignorant) knowledge:
The worst generally acknowledged culprits for dietary promotion of disease are sugars and trans fats. Sugars are easy to add in arbitrary quantities in “all natural” form.
The worst remaining likely culprits for dietary promotion of disease are salt, nitrates/nitrites, and excesses of many other fats (likely everything except omega-3 and monounsaturated fatty acids in the average modern diet?). These are all easy to add via “all natural” ingredients.
The worst still-controversial suspected culprits for dietary promotion of disease are high-carb diets and high dietary cholesterol; both of these are easy to add via “all natural” sources.
We obviously don’t know nearly as much as we should about nutrition as we should. The big Mediterranean diet study showing 50+% reduction in cardiovascular incidents was only a decade ago, and the study narrowing most of that down to nuts and olive oil was just a year ago! But it seems that we know enough to say that there are ways to make food much more immediately satisfying and much less healthy without using any ingredients that wouldn’t have been available throughout human history; all we have to do is use too much of some of them. All-natural diets scored a big victory in the case of trans fats, and may avoid similar artificial food mistakes in the future too, but the worst natural ingredients seem to be much worse for you than the best artificial ingredients, so simply avoiding the latter isn’t a panacea.