NATURAL OR SAFE?

In early June, Kavin Senapathy - author and public speaker on health, medicine, food, and parenting - has published a nice article devoted to a – minor, but, in its own way, epochal – event. Johnson's Baby, the brand of baby cosmetics and skin care products owned by the American multinational company Johnson & Johnson, has created  and distributed a commercial video, promoting its products by declaring “Natural may be the trend, but safe will always be our bar. Some natural ingredients that work for adults are too harsh for babies skin. We’ll never sacrifice safety to be all natural.” 

"Given the natural-is-best craze permeating the market for food, cleaning products, cosmetics, personal care and even cat litter,-asks herself Kavin -  why go against the all-natural grain?” The question is more than legitimate, considering Johnson & Johnson well-established marketing strategy.  Since 1897 - when the brand was created to commercialize a talc based baby powder, the Johnson's Baby Powder - Johnson & Johnson has had its own marketing strategy based on communicating an image of healthy and soft products.  As early as 1913, the company invented the catchphrase "Best for the Baby – Best for You", contributing to instill into the public the idea that baby products are safer, smarter and smoother than corresponding products for adults. In 1953, Johnson & Johnson launched the “No More Tears baby shampoo”, which was a true revolution not only in soaps (being based on a new class of cleansing agents, never used in the past), but it was also a real breakthrough in promotional campaigns. Since then, Johnson & Johnson – notably its subsidiary Johnson's Baby – has betted on consumer awareness and natural products that do not have any chemicals inside. Johnson & Johnson is member of the American Green Power Partnership; its promotional campaigns usually aim to inspire healthy living styles (e.g., “Having a Baby Changes Things” and “The Campaign for Nursing’s Future”); and natural products and environmental friendly packaging have become two pillars of corporate policies. This is why the slogan “At Johnson’s, being natural is never more important than being safe” is not only a “refreshing change from the all-natural marketing norm” – as Kavin comments – but it bodes well that it could herald a real revolution.

The idea that everything natural is better, safer, healthier and more environmentally friendly, is a popular misconception, which does not need even to be disproved. It is apparent that natural substances might be – and often are – as harmful, unhealthy and dangerous for the environment, as synthetic substances. Yet, “due to the widespread assumption that artificial ingredients are somehow more harsh or harmful than natural ones, companies have been reformulating products to eliminate synthetics while others build niche brands based on the fallacy”. In the last decades, such a fallacy has largely informed anti GMO and anti-Vax movements, and has contributed to feed the current, global, wave of “anti-scientism” and mistrust towards scientists, health institutions, and drug companies.  The suspicion of synthetic substances is producing paradoxical consequences, for instance these people mistrust vaccines - which are one of the most “natural” medical interventions -  and ignore the danger entailed by infectious diseases, one of the chief “natural killers” in human communities.  Yet, it is not easy to oppose the zeitgeist, as it is illustrated by another, apparently minor, event happened.

Since the mid-1970s, a chemical weed killer, marketed by Monsanto as RoundUp, has become the world most widely used pesticide, being an effective and apparently safer alternative to traditional weed killers. In 2015, the WHO Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared RoundUp a probable carcinogen (category 2A), causing inter alia the postponing of relicensing in the EU and a harsh public campaign against Monsanto led by Greenpeace. On June 14, 2017, Reuters investigation revealed that Aaron Blair, the scientist who led the IARC’s review panel, “had access to data from a large study that strongly suggested that Roundup did not cause cancer after all—but he withheld that data from the RoundUp review panel”. When this odd story emerged, both Blair and the IARC justified themselves by claiming that data (whose existence they admitted being fully aware) was published only after the IARC report and the agency has a policy against using unpublished data. No matter here whether such a self-defense is tenable (in this writer's opinion,  it is not), and whether they were instead driven by untold conflicts of interest, I mentioned this story only to illustrate the power of the stereotype dictating that Monsanto, as well as other chemical giants, are by default producing dangerous and unhealthy items, even that they are “criminal” companies. Admittedly, may be just this once,  Monsanto was not at all the villain of the story, rather the victim.