Everything Is Natural: Exploring How Chemicals Are Natural, How Nature Is Chemical and Why That Should Excite Us

Since the early 1990s, advances in toxicology have allowed scientists to detect traces of adulterant substances in everyday products - even down to parts per billion concentrations.We can now detect the presence of harmful ingredients at levels so low that they actually cause no harm. Nonetheless, we get scared. We are now able to overreact to harmless, negligible sources of contamination and flock to ‘natural’, ‘organic’ and ‘chemical-free’ alternative products at elevated prices instead.This urge is driven in part by a set of interesting psychological quirks called the naturalness preference or biophilia.While exposure to many aspects of nature improves our physical and mental wellbeing, marketers are taking advantage of our naturalness preference by selling us ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ products with no functional advantage, sometimes to the detriment of the environment, and that have the unfortunate added effect of peddling a fear of conventional products that do not make such natural