The Cult of the All Natural

So the other day I was going on about Coffee and few days into the next rant cycle a new response to the coffee thoughts came on questioning my motivation to switch from sugar to a man engineered sugar substitute. While my written response was less than passionate (and heavy with typos) My initial human response was, "(Explicative deleted) you for questioning!" Yes, when I get pushed into a corner without adequate time to reason out an argument, I almost always go for the four letter word response. My adrenaline pumps. The brain shuts down. The Primal beast says, "Destroy the enemy."

I'm just not a fan of the "It's Natural" argument. I've heard many a pot head rant about how "herb" (note how they use the word that has cooking / positive connotations rather than "weed") is natures medicine not like some man made pharmaceutical. I often heard people knock sugar substitutes as substances that will probably cause cancer. I've seen the all natural diets and the all natural section of the nutrition stores in the mall. What bothers me about this is what bothers me about almost any religion: It assumes that only God (or I suppose the earth spirit or whatever we are using as the current mother nature symbol) is Good and that all that humans can produce is bad and doomed to failure.

I'm not one to get into the God or no God argument. I have no idea and I don't believe any book is divinely inspired be it 2000 years old or ten (When did Dianetics come out?) or that anyone else who claims to know for sure one way or the other actually does. I do believe that the human race has made tremendous strides in all of the sciences, not only in medicine, within just the last ten years. Heck a hypochondriac like me can, if he had insurance and money, can go get a full body scan from one of those places you hear advertised on the radio and know just how well the inside bits are working and just what kind of shape they are in. Sure we screw up a lot. Its not like we really know how a lot of these things work until a large enough human population has been subjected to it. But we also get a lot right.

Think of it this way. Have you ever met anyone who suffered from polio? I've known a couple people in my life. People my parents age can give first hand accounts of what polio did to people. Ask the survivors how they feel about the "man made" vaccinations. Sure I bet many are bitter that the vaccinations were not available in time for them but I'll bet you long odds they wouldn't wish their condition on anyone.

Think about agriculture. Without the scientific advances in irrigation and fertilization as well as the new strains of crops that have been developed there is no way we could possibly feed the worlds population on as little land as we do. You sure wouldn't see the suburban land developments on like the ones that go up now outside of Chicago. All that prime farm land would be in use.

What makes me use Splenda instead of sugar besides just the calories. I have faith in the human race. I wish more people felt the same way.

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