The claims about naturalness, purity, and authenticity of food may sometimes be quite misleading in food marketing. This is due all these terms being highly ambiguous: they all have several independent meanings. Some of those meanings are health related whereas others are conceptually independent from healthiness. Should the use of the terms ‘natural’, ‘pure’, and ‘authentic’, thus, be regulated in order to protect consumers from misleading food advertising? I argue for non-regulation. The terms are so ambiguous and have so many different meanings, that the regulation would (1) either have to rely only on one or very few of the many possible meanings of the terms (2) or in order to be extensive consist of long and complicated list of different meanings of the terms. Both alternatives are unlikely to help most consumers in their food choices.
