On classifying the things we put into our bodies
There’s a quiet problem hiding in plain sight.
There’s a quiet problem hiding in plain sight.
Not in a lab.
Not in a courtroom.
Not even in a hospital.
It’s in the way we decide what things are.
Take something simple.
A capsule of vitamin D.
A cup of ginger tea.
An extract of St John’s Wort.
Depending on who you ask, these are:
foods
supplements
medicines
or, in some contexts, something closer to a controlled substance
Same substance.
Different label.
And that label matters more than most people realise.
The illusion of categories
We like clean boxes.
Safe / unsafe
Food / drug
Natural / synthetic
They make the world feel manageable.
But biology doesn’t work that way.
Every biologically active substance—whether it comes from a plant, a laboratory, or a fermentation tank—interacts with the body through chemistry.
It binds.
It inhibits.
It amplifies.
And critically:
It behaves differently depending on dose, duration, and context.
A substance that supports health at one level can cause harm at another.
This isn’t controversial.
It’s the foundation of toxicology:
the dose makes the poison
So the real question isn’t:
“Is this substance safe?”
It’s:
“Under what conditions does this substance become risky?”
The messy middle
Now here’s where things get interesting.
Natural health products don’t sit neatly at one end of the spectrum.
They live in the middle.
Some are well-studied:
vitamin D for deficiency
melatonin for circadian rhythm
Others are less clear:
mixed botanical extracts
products with variable composition
compounds supported more by tradition than by trials
And many are somewhere in between.
This creates a problem.
Because regulation prefers clarity.
How regulation thinks
Regulatory systems tend to ask one of two questions:
What does this substance do? (risk-based thinking)
What is this substance used for? (use-based thinking)
Neither is wrong.
But they don’t always agree.
A product might:
behave like a drug
but be used like a supplement
Or:
have low intrinsic risk
but make strong therapeutic claims
So where does it go?
There isn’t always a clean answer.
When labels start to drift
Over time, classification systems evolve.
New categories get layered onto old ones.
Historical decisions stick around.
Practical considerations creep in.
And slowly, something subtle happens:
The label starts to reflect not just the science…
but the system around the science.
That doesn’t mean the system is broken.
But it does mean that:
Classification is not a purely scientific act.
It’s an interpretation.
An interpretation of:
evidence
uncertainty
and acceptable risk
The population-level twist
Now zoom out.
Because this isn’t just about individual substances.
It’s about how millions of people actually use them.
Natural health products are often:
available without prescription
used alongside conventional medicine
chosen based on labels, advice, or personal experience
This creates a very real-world layer of complexity.
Two people can take the same product and have very different outcomes because:
they take different doses
they take it for different lengths of time
they combine it with different medications
And most of that variability never shows up in a clinical trial.
Information matters as much as chemistry
There’s another layer too—less visible, but just as important.
Information.
People don’t just respond to molecules.
They respond to what they believe about those molecules.
Labels.
Marketing.
Assumptions about “natural” meaning “safe.”
This creates what scientists call information asymmetry:
the product has properties
the user has an interpretation
And those two are not always aligned.
So what are we actually classifying?
At this point, the question changes.
We’re no longer just classifying substances.
We’re classifying:
how much we know about them
how risky they might be
and how they’re likely to be used in the real world
Which means the classification itself becomes:
a reflection of how we handle uncertainty
A different way to think about it
Imagine a simple map.
On one axis:
→ strength of evidence
On the other:
↑ risk potential
Some products sit in:
low risk, high evidence
Others:
higher risk, lower evidence
And many occupy the vast, messy middle.
Now overlay regulation on top of that map.
You don’t get neat boxes.
You get zones—shifting, overlapping, interpretive.
The quiet conclusion
Here’s the part that doesn’t make headlines.
There is no single, clean way to classify natural health products.
Not because we’ve failed to define them.
But because they don’t belong to a single category to begin with.
They are:
diverse
context-dependent
and unevenly understood
So the systems we build to manage them will always carry a degree of:
approximation
interpretation
and judgement
And that’s the signal
Not that one side is right and the other is wrong.
But that:
Classification is not a fixed truth.
It’s a moving boundary drawn across a changing landscape.
And that’s the signal over noise.