If you were forced to choose between eating 100g of a random "chemical" molecule, or 100g of a random "natural" molecule, you would be much better off with the latter.
That is a distinctly ignorant and biased statement. Go eat 100g of sand, of seawater, tree bark, crude oil, or algae. Notice how I stacked the deck in that list, as these are just naturally occurring things not merely chemicals. Try eating 100g of caffeine, botulinum toxin, vitamin E, nicotine, DNA, warfarin, morphine, or ricin.
Nature is far from harmless, it's merely familiar so that we are more prone to accept whatever degree of harm it holds as, well, "natural". Man-made novel chemical compounds are not all harmless either, but imagining that there is a firm barrier between "natural" and "man-made" and that one category is far and away safer than the other is superstitious thinking.
That is a distinctly ignorant and biased statement. Go eat 100g of sand, of seawater, tree bark, crude oil, or algae. Notice how I stacked the deck in that list, as these are just naturally occurring things not merely chemicals. Try eating 100g of caffeine, botulinum toxin, vitamin E, nicotine, DNA, warfarin, morphine, or ricin.
Nature is far from harmless, it's merely familiar so that we are more prone to accept whatever degree of harm it holds as, well, "natural". Man-made novel chemical compounds are not all harmless either, but imagining that there is a firm barrier between "natural" and "man-made" and that one category is far and away safer than the other is superstitious thinking.