Ben Greenfield explains that natural and artificial flavors are often the exact same molecules. Making passion-fruit flavor from real fruit would require a quarter of the world's passion fruit supply, so flavorists use synthetic alternatives instead.
The definition of a natural flavor is it's anything that comes from a spice, a fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf, meat, seafood, poultry, egg, dairy product, or anything fermented from any of those foods. Now, the fact is, natural and artificial flavors can be the exact same molecules. Nutritionally, there can be no difference between them, and both are used quite a bit in our modern world where we consume food that has been enhanced in some way by one of these so called flavorists. You know, for example, if you want to create a passion fruit flavored product with actual passion fruit for, say, a vodka, a flavorist would need to consume like basically a quarter of the world's passion fruit supply to make that happen. That's not cost effective, nor is it friendly to the environment.
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