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Petroleum is natural [1]

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Date: 2025-06-08

Q. How are botulism, salmonella, petroleum, and black widow spider venom alike?

A. They are all natural and they’re all toxic.

RFK Jr’s brainworm must have been working overtime when it came up with the plan to make America’s food manufacturers switch to natural dyes. Assuming that a product is benign, much less, healthy just because it’s natural is beyond stupid. The purpose of this post is to show you why, and to outline what should be done instead.

First I’ll describe a typical process for harvesting a dye bearing plant and extraction of the dye. Then I’ll compare that to another typical process, that of synthesizing a dye from petroleum. If you’re not interested in the gory details, just skip to the conclusion.

Isolation and purification of a natural dye

Imagine that you’re hovering somewhere in Southeast Asia. Below you a team of laborers is hacking down some weeds and piling them onto a flatbed truck. The weeds are then transported to a factory where:

The weeds are beaten up to break the roots from the stems from the leaves. The parts are segregated by density with an air separator. Let’s assume for the sake of illustration that our dye molecule is located in the leaves. The leaves then get ground up into fine particles. The fine particles are dumped into a large tank along with a cocktail of hazardous solvents. The purpose of this and the next few steps is isolate the dye molecule from the 5000 other chemicals that make up the leaves. Most of those 5000 chemicals are completely unknown to us. Keep in mind that ANY ONE OF THOSE 5000 CHEMICALS MAY BE TOXIC. Oh, and it would be nice to exclude whatever herbicides and pesticides might have been sprayed on our weeds. The weed fines are boiled up with the hazardous chemicals for an hour or so. The resulting liquid is pumped through a series of filters to get rid of the solids. The liquid fraction is mixed with water to extract out water soluble impurities. The oily and water phases are allowed to separate and the oily phase (containing our natural dye and hazardous solvents and – hopefully – fewer than 5000 other chemicals) are siphoned off into what’s known as a stripper where the hazardous solvents are evaporated off; ideally down to a non-detectable level. The residual mix is pumped to a distillation system where our natural dye is purified from the remaining chemicals of the oily phase. At least, that’s what we hope. Did it really? See Step 10. And what chemical reactions could have occurred between the 5000 chemicals, herbicides, and pesticides that are expected to be present in our weed, and the chemicals that we added in the factory to extract and purify the dye. We have to rely on the next step to determine if we’ve been successful. Testing. We have to pull a sample from each batch of purified dye and test it in a certified laboratory to ensure that each of the potential 5000 chemicals that started out in the weed have not been carried over into our final product dye. Any guess as to how many tests that might entail? Might we consume our whole batch of product just in testing?

That’s how a typical natural dye might be extracted from its source plant. Now let’s compare that to a typical synthetic dye.

Synthesis and purification of a synthetic dye

We’ll start a hundred million years ago. Millions of dinosaurs, ferns, plankton, algae, and miscellaneous critters get buried deep in the earth. Mother nature compresses and bakes that mixture under extreme conditions for millions of years to make petroleum. Note that no human is involved in the creation of petroleum. Therefore – wait for it - PETROLEUM IS ALL NATURAL. Fast forward to today. This is where us humans get involved. We simply pump the stuff out of the ground. The petroleum is transported to a refinery where we humans separate it into its component parts: basic chemicals like butane, pentane, hexane, heptane, benzene, toluene, and a host of others. A portion of the petroleum is pumped into a ‘cracker’ where larger molecules are smashed into smaller ones with heat. These basic chemicals are collected, purified and sold in massive quantities to companies who react them together in very specific ways to create synthetic compounds. One of them could very well be a synthetic version of our natural dye. The type of chemical plant will be determined by the particular dye to be synthesized. But the operations will usually include chemical reactions, liquid – liquid extractions, solvent stripping, distillation, and crystallization. Do these processes sound familiar? Yes, we encountered them in the above section on natural dye isolation. Testing. We have to pull a sample from each batch of purified dye and test it for all of our specifications. This testing will tell us whether we have excluded any toxic compound from carrying over into our product.

Contrasts

There’s a feature of this process of creating synthetic products that needs to be contrasted with the natural product extraction process that I outlined above. In the synthetic process we start with well-known and characterized basic chemicals and combine them together to make our product. WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT WE’RE STARTING WITH.

Because we started with a finite number of known compounds, the job of testing to ensure that we have excluded toxins from the final product is much easier than with natural starting materials.

Similarities

In both the natural and the synthetic processes, we start with natural products, plants & petroleum. Whether a dye is originally derived from living material or petroleum, it is processed with hazardous chemicals, then purified and tested with similar techniques. See Figure 1.

Conclusion

Alright, now that I’ve pissed off both the left and the right, let’s get to the point of this story: One cannot assume that a dye derived from living material is inherently any safer than from petroleum. ANY PRODUCT THAT IS ADDED TO FOOD NEEDS TO BE ASSESSED FOR HAZARDS, BOTH ACUTE AND CHRONIC, NO MATTER WHAT ITS ORIGIN. We have a real problem with hazards in our food. Anyone who thinks that a simplistic solution, like “Natural is good”, is fooling themselves.

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