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I live by a simple rule, if it's an artificial chemical or if it's packaged, it's most likely bad for my body while anything natural is most likely good or ok.

The fact is that humans are bad at long term impact studies. When long term studies reveal something, it's very hard to take that stuff off market (not that we haven't done so. We have with done that with Talc, Asbestos). It's also possible that something is considered safe today but might be proven to be harmful decades later. We think that organizations like FDA are only thinking about health of people but that's not entirely true, they also need to think about economic impact of their actions. Declaring something carcinogen which is billion $ product, it's going to be very hard for them to do so.

So, my rule is to simply err on the side of caution.

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Anything natural is most likely OK? So by your estimation if you were lost in the woods, at least 50% of everything you'd see would not just be edible but actually good for you? I mean, just to cite an example, if you chew the seeds of apples and swallow them you're eating amygdalin, which is a chemical that reacts into cyanide in the stomach. Asbestos is a naturally-occurring mineral.

If anything, entirely the opposite is true. Most things in the world are either inedible (in the sense that they're immediately mechanically harmful to eat) or toxic in some way or another, at least without some "artificial" processing.

You are reading between the lines and assuming that in every situation my only decision making criteria are there rules. Anyways, I knew while writing there will be people making such comments

Well, you did start your comment with "I live by a simple rule".

There are a bunch of natural carcinogens that occur in unpackaged ordinary food, some of which have clear epidemiology, which is something you can't say about any artificial sweetener, or even drinking pure RoundUp. Avoiding packaged food can be a good rule for other reasons, but it's not a divining rod for carcinogenicity.

> but it's not a divining rod for carcinogenicity.

True, but what they said was:

> it's most likely bad for my body while anything natural is most likely good or ok.

...as a guiding principal it is probably right.

Do not eat anything that your great grand aunt would not recognise as food.

My mom is in her sixties and doesn't recognize escargot or offal as food and believes sushi and medium rare pork are unacceptably risky.

The further you go back the more reliance you find on preservative techniques other than refrigeration. That means a lot of salt, or smoking, which is a known carcinogen.

I think rules like this can be useful. I'm also wary of new things, as in freshly popular materials, like a new type of coating on non-stick pans. Another "rule" is that the more processed something is, the more removed it is from the original thing, then it probably lost its useful quality, no matter how much it resembles the original thing.

Regarding artificial vs natural, looking for natural stuff can be a good rule of thumb, but the "appeal to nature" is a logical fallacy for a good reason. Lots of natural things are bad for us, and because we already live in a pretty artificial environment, other things need to be adjusted too, because natural ways sometimes only work in natural environments.

Substitutions, like diet coke, can also be a trap. When the premise is that I can just do away with harmful X, by substituting it with Y, and have basically the same thing, then I'm always watchful. Usually there's no free lunch.

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