The advertisement of a fruit juice, recently posted on social media, states the following: “without addition of colorants, preservatives, sugar and ascorbic acid”.

If we were playing “find the intruder” as a game, what would you take out from the list above?

Ascorbic acid (more commonly known as vitamin C) is a natural substance and is by itself present in fresh food, especially fruits and vegetables [1, 2]. This means there is no need to add it to the fruit juice, which (if freshly made) most likely already contains it!

Including ascorbic acid in a list of “unwanted” ingredients is misleading and clearly shows a common misconception linked to the idea that chemical substances (especially when reported with their technical name) are by definition bad for our health. On top of that, the word chemical is often improperly intended as a synonym of synthetic. 

The purpose of this article is to bring the lay readers closer to the “chemistry side” of commonly used or consumed substances, with the final aim of increasing the level of awareness and hopefully helping to demystify generally spread misconceptions.

We can start by clarifying the meaning of frequently used terms. If we look at the Oxford dictionary’s [3] first definitions of the aforementioned words chemical, synthetic and natural, we find:

–   Chemical, “connected with chemistry”;

–   Synthetic, “artificial; made by combining chemical substances rather than being produced naturally by plants or animals”;

–   Natural, “existing in nature; not made or caused by humans”.

 So, according to its definition, chemical is anything composed of chemical elements. Furthermore, it is worth adding here that some natural substances are listed among the most potent poisons known nowadays, good examples being the botulinum toxin [4] or the hydrocyanic acid [5, 6]. On the other hand, a natural substance and its synthetic counterpart are 100% equivalent [7]. The second has been synthesized with a series of chemical reactions, while the first has been extracted from its natural source, by means of chemical and/or mechanical steps.

Therefore, nothing makes a natural molecule “good” or “bad” per se, and the same goes for synthetic ones: trivially, in both cases, it depends on their chemistry. For example, the vast majority of commercial drugs are synthetic, although some of them might have a natural origin. It is the case of the very well-known acetylsalicylic acid (Aspirin) [8], which has been discovered starting from the natural molecule salicylic acid [9] [10]. 

Taking back two of the aforementioned natural compounds, vitamin C and hydrocyanic acid (HCN) are examples of small molecules, both present in commonly consumed food and, at the same time, exerting extraordinarily different effects on our health. In fact, sweet almonds contain on average 25 mg/Kg of HCN [11], whose acute oral lethal dose for humans is reported to be between 0.5 and 3.5 mg/Kg of body weight [11, 5]. Even the “healthy” vitamin C itself, if taken in high amounts (more than 1 g per day), might lead to side effects like diarrhoea, stomach pain, and flatulence [12]. This introduces the notion that, apart from the chemistry, the intake amounts (for almost any substance) do make the difference as well.

To answer the original question, all-natural products contain chemistry, since they are composed of chemical elements. Both natural and synthetic molecules can have beneficial or detrimental effects on our health, depending both on their chemical composition and on the consumed amounts, a topic that will be more specifically dissected in our next editions, stay tuned!