"Natural" feels like a promise of health, but legally it barely means anything. The FDA has never formally defined the term for food. Its longstanding policy is only that it 'has not objected' to the word when a food has no added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances — a statement about a few ingredients, not about whether the food is good for you.\ \ So a bag of ultra-processed chips fried in refined oil can say 'all natural,' while a carton of pasteurized milk technically can't (pasteurization is a process). The word says nothing about how processed a food is, how much sugar it packs, whether it's organic, or how the animals or crops were raised.\ \ Don't confuse it with words that ARE regulated: 'organic' needs USDA certification, 'gluten-free' has a legal threshold, and the Nutrition Facts panel is verifiable. The move is simple — treat 'natural' as decoration and flip the package over. The ingredient list and Nutrition Facts tell you what 'natural' won't.