You’re standing in the cereal aisle holding two boxes. Same grain, same weight, nearly the same ingredient list. One box says “all natural” across the front and costs a dollar more.
That dollar is buying you a word. In the United States, that word has no rule behind it.
Food scientists at Ohio State University tested almost exactly this situation. Using immersive technology, they dropped people into a simulated store where a sampling server handed them two identical products, one of them labeled all natural. The label by itself raised how shoppers rated the product’s quality and its nutritional content. When the server also said the claim out loud, average willingness to pay rose about 8%. The study ran in the Journal of Food Science in 2017.
Nothing about the food changed. Only the word did.
You’ll meet that word everywhere in a grocery store. It’s on juice and jerky, on granola bars and salad dressing, on deodorant and shampoo two aisles over. It shows up on supplements, where it tends to do the most harm.
So here’s the question this article answers: what does that word legally establish? The honest answer is something narrow about what got added to the food, and nothing at all about how it was grown, how it was processed, or whether it’s good for you.
Every claim on a package sits in one of four buckets
Before you judge any word on a label, figure out which kind of word it is. There are four kinds, and they’re nowhere near equal.
Defined in regulation. A federal agency wrote an actual rule, published it in the Code of Federal Regulations, and a company that violates it is breaking the law. “Organic” works this way. So, surprisingly, does “fresh.”
Governed by agency guidance or policy. The agency has stated how it reads a word and how it intends to act, but no rule exists. Enforcement happens case by case, usually only when something looks clearly deceptive.
Certified by a private body. An organization outside government writes a standard and audits companies against it. The standard might be demanding or it might be thin. Either way, no federal agency wrote it and no federal agency enforces it.
Undefined. Nobody wrote anything. Anyone can print the word.
“Natural” on a packaged food lands in the second bucket, and only just. The Food and Drug Administration has a policy. It has never had a rule.
What FDA’s policy says
On its page about the term, FDA explains that it has not engaged in rulemaking to create a formal definition. What exists instead is a longstanding policy the agency has applied for decades.
Under that policy, FDA has treated “natural” to mean that “nothing artificial or synthetic… has been added to a food that would not normally be expected to be in that food.” Color additives count, and FDA makes a point of saying regardless of source. A color pulled from a beet is still a color additive.
Read that sentence slowly, because every piece of it is narrow.
It’s about adding. Not growing, not processing, not nutrition. It’s about things that are artificial or synthetic. And the test is whether a reasonable person would expect that substance to be in that food in the first place.
A fruit juice with a synthetic preservative stirred in would fail. A pasteurized juice, pressed from fruit sprayed with approved pesticides and stripped of its fiber, would pass. That is the whole shape of the policy.
Now look at the phrase doing the quiet work: “would not normally be expected to be in that food.” Expected by whom, based on what? Vinegar belongs in pickles and nobody blinks. Does a concentrated plant extract belong in a cookie? Does a bacterial culture grown in a tank belong in a yogurt drink? Reasonable people land in different places, and no rule settles it.
That ambiguity is why the policy functions less like a standard and more like a tiebreaker. FDA can point to it when a claim looks obviously deceptive. A company can point to it when defending a borderline one. Neither side is working from a published test with numbers in it.
The three questions the policy refuses to answer
FDA’s own page is unusually direct about what the policy leaves untouched. These three gaps are the most useful facts in this article.
Is it better for you? FDA says it did not consider whether “natural” should describe any nutritional or health benefit. The agency never decided the word means healthier, lower in sugar, lower in sodium, or anything else about your body. That is the exact belief the Ohio State study found the label creating.
How was it farmed? The policy does not address food production methods, and FDA names pesticide use specifically. A natural claim says nothing about what was sprayed on the crop or how the animals were raised.
How was it processed? The policy does not address manufacturing and processing methods either. FDA names thermal technologies, pasteurization and irradiation as examples. Heavy processing is not a bar to the claim.
Put those together and you get a word that covers a short list of additives and leaves out almost everything a shopper imagines it covers.
Why the rule never got written
FDA didn’t ignore this. It opened the question and then stopped.
Three citizen petitions asked the agency to define “natural,” and a fourth asked it to ban the word from labels entirely. A citizen petition is a formal written request from a company, an advocacy group or an individual asking an agency to issue, change or cancel a rule. It’s one of the few ways an outsider can force a regulator to put something on the record.
Federal courts pushed too. Judges hearing private lawsuits asked FDA to make administrative determinations about whether foods containing genetically engineered ingredients or high fructose corn syrup can be labeled natural. Rather than guess at what the agency meant, those courts wanted the agency to say.
FDA opened a public docket, numbered FDA-2014-N-1207, and asked three questions: should it define the term, how should it define it, and how should it decide when the word is used appropriately. The comment period closed on May 10, 2016.
No rule followed. The FDA page describing all of this carries a content-current date of October 22, 2018. Check it yourself before you lean on the word, because the status of a pending question can change and a date that old deserves a second look.
Why defining it is harder than it sounds
It’s tempting to read the delay as regulators asleep at the wheel. The fairer reading is that the job is genuinely ugly, and both sides of it are worth stating.
Write the definition loosely and it certifies almost everything, which is roughly where the policy already sits. Write it tightly and you have to make calls nobody agrees on. Is a food natural if the crop was conventionally bred over 60 years into something its wild ancestor would not recognize? Is juice still natural after flash pasteurization, a step that exists to keep people from getting sick? Does a sweetener count because it started in a leaf, even after a dozen chemical separations?
Every line FDA could draw either outlaws a familiar product or blesses one that feels wrong. Meanwhile, companies keep using the word, shoppers keep paying for it, and the courts keep sending the question back.
That is the honest trade-off. The absence of a rule is not proof that anyone is lying to you. It is proof that you cannot use the word as evidence of anything specific.
FDA defined “fresh.” It never defined “natural.”
This is the detail that reframes the whole subject. FDA has written binding rules for other words on your food. It just didn’t write one for this one.
Take “fresh.” Under 21 CFR 101.95, when “fresh” suggests a food is unprocessed, the food has to be raw and cannot have been frozen, thermally processed or otherwise preserved. That’s a real rule with real teeth. It also carries exceptions most shoppers would never guess. Treating raw food with ionizing radiation up to 1 kiloGray is permitted. So is a mild chlorine or mild acid wash on produce. So are approved waxes and coatings, and so are approved pesticides applied after the harvest.
So a waxed, post-harvest-sprayed, irradiated apple can legally be called fresh. The word is defined. The definition is just more permissive than its reputation.
Then take “natural flavor.” That phrase has a precise regulatory definition at 21 CFR 101.22(a)(3). A natural flavor is an essential oil, an oleoresin, an essence or extractive, a protein hydrolysate, a distillate, or something produced by roasting, heating or enzymolysis, whose flavoring constituents come from plant or animal material such as spices, fruits, vegetables, herbs, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs or dairy. The rule adds one more condition: its significant function in the food has to be flavoring rather than nutrition.
That’s a wide door. An intensely concentrated extract produced in a flavor house through enzyme treatment is a natural flavor under the rule. The regulation defines origin, not simplicity.
The lesson generalizes. A word being defined doesn’t mean it means what you assumed. And a word being undefined means you’re on your own.
Meat and poultry answer to a different agency
If you’re looking at raw chicken, ground beef or a package of bacon, FDA isn’t in charge. The Food Safety and Inspection Service at USDA regulates meat and poultry labeling, and it treats the word differently.
FSIS defines a natural product as “a product containing no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed.” It goes one step further than FDA by requiring the label to explain the term, with wording along the lines of no artificial ingredients and minimally processed.
That extra requirement matters, because it forces the claim to carry its own limits on the package instead of floating free.
FSIS applies the same documentation logic to related claims. “No antibiotics added” can appear on meat or poultry only when the producer gives USDA records showing the animals were raised without them. For pork and poultry, “no hormones added” has to be accompanied by a statement that federal rules prohibit hormones in raising those animals, because otherwise the claim implies a difference that doesn’t exist. For beef, “no hormones administered” can be approved when a producer documents it.
So the same five letters mean one thing on a box of crackers and a slightly stricter thing on a package of chicken thighs, enforced by a different agency.
“Natural” is not a safety rating
This is where the word does real damage, and it shows up most often in the supplement aisle rather than the grocery aisle.
Supplements are not a niche product. Among US adults aged 20 and over, 57.6% had taken one in the previous 30 days, according to 2017 to 2018 survey data published in a 2021 data brief by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Among women 60 and older it was 80.2%.
Those products also reach you through a different legal door than medicines do. A drug has to clear FDA approval before it goes on sale. A supplement does not, as the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements explains. Companies are required to hold evidence that their products are safe and that label claims are truthful, but unless a product contains a new dietary ingredient, they don’t have to hand that evidence to FDA before marketing it.
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says plainly that natural does not always mean safe, and points to kava, a plant in the pepper family, whose supplements can cause liver disease. NCCIH also warns that labels can be inaccurate, and notes that FDA has found prescription drugs inside products sold as supplements.
The scale here is not small. A 2017 review in the journal Hepatology, drawn from a research symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the National Institutes of Health, reported that herbal and dietary supplements account for about 20% of hepatotoxicity cases in the United States. The authors identified anabolic steroids sold as bodybuilding products, green tea extract, and multi-ingredient supplements as the most commonly implicated. For most multi-ingredient products, the offending component is unknown.
Plant-derived substances interact with medicines too. Vitamin K takes the edge off what warfarin is supposed to do, and St. John’s wort hurries many drugs out of the body. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements spells out both. It also flags products that raise bleeding risk or shift how anesthesia affects you, and it tells people to disclose everything they take before surgery.
Get professional help in these situations. Call your clinician if your skin or the whites of your eyes turn yellow, which MedlinePlus describes as jaundice and lists medicines among its causes. Call if you develop unexplained severe fatigue, nausea or abdominal pain after starting a new herbal product. Stop the product and contact your provider for any new side effect. And tell your surgeon, your anesthesiologist and your pharmacist about every supplement you take, well before a scheduled procedure, not the morning of.
None of that is an argument against plant-based products. It’s an argument against reading one word on a front panel as a safety finding.
What the claim is worth
A little, and it’s worth being precise about how little, because dismissing the claim entirely is its own kind of sloppy.
If a packaged food carries a natural claim and the company is following FDA’s policy, you have a weak indication that it doesn’t contain synthetic additives or added color. If you’re someone who reacts to a particular artificial dye, or who simply prefers a shorter ingredient list, that’s not nothing.
But you can get the same information, with far more certainty, by turning the package over. The ingredient list is mandatory and standardized. It names what’s in there. A claim on the front is a company’s summary of itself. The list on the back is the thing the summary is supposed to describe.
One more boundary worth drawing. “Natural” is not “organic,” and the two are not interchangeable. Organic is a federal regulation with mandatory third-party certification behind it, and it’s covered in its own article. A natural claim carries none of that machinery. Treating them as cousins is the single most common mistake shoppers make with either word.
Five questions to ask before you pay more
Use these in the store. They take about twenty seconds.
-
What exactly do I think this word is promising me? Name it out loud. Fewer additives? Less spray? Better nutrition? Only the first one is even partly covered.
-
Is there a defined claim for the thing I care about? If pesticides and farming practices are your concern, “organic” is a regulated term with mandatory third-party certification and real inspection behind it. That is a separate subject with its own article. If genetic engineering is your concern, the federal bioengineered food disclosure is the term to look for. “Natural” substitutes for neither.
-
Does the back of the package agree with the front? Flip it over and read the ingredient list and the Nutrition Facts panel. Those are mandatory and standardized. The front panel is marketing space.
-
Is this FDA territory or USDA territory? Meat and poultry carry the stricter version of the claim, including a required explanation on the label. Packaged foods do not.
-
Would I still buy this at the same price without the word? If the answer is no, you’re paying for the claim and not the food. The Ohio State work suggests that’s a common outcome.
The most useful takeaway is simpler than any of that. On a packaged food, “natural” is a statement about what someone chose not to add. Treat it as a weak signal about additives and nothing else, and go look for a defined claim whenever you care about something specific. The front of a box is where a company talks. The back is where the law makes it answer.
Sources
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Use of the Term Natural on Food Labeling.” fda.gov
- USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Meat and Poultry Labeling Terms.” fsis.usda.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “21 CFR 101.22, Foods; labeling of spices, flavorings, colorings and chemical preservatives.” ecfr.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “21 CFR 101.95, Fresh, freshly frozen, fresh frozen, frozen fresh.” ecfr.gov
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. “Using Dietary Supplements Wisely.” nccih.nih.gov
- NIH Office of Dietary Supplements. “Dietary Supplements: What You Need to Know.” ods.od.nih.gov
- CDC National Center for Health Statistics. “Dietary Supplement Use Among Adults: United States, 2017-2018 (Data Brief No. 399).” cdc.gov
- MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine. “Jaundice.” medlineplus.gov
- USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. “Labeling Organic Products.” ams.usda.gov
- USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. “BE Disclosure (National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard).” ams.usda.gov
- PubMed. “Liu R, Hooker NH, Parasidis E, Simons CT. "A Natural Experiment: Using Immersive Technologies to Study the Impact of 'All-Natural' Labeling on Perceived Food Quality, Nutritional Content, and Liking." Journal of Food Science, 2017. DOI: 10.1111/1750-3841.13639.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Navarro VJ, Khan I, Bjornsson E, Seeff LB, Serrano J, Hoofnagle JH. "Liver injury from herbal and dietary supplements." Hepatology, 2017. DOI: 10.1002/hep.28813.” doi.org