As I said in Naturalistic Superstition, superstition—whether supernatural or natural—is frequently aimed at trying to achieve control over the world that one does not actually have. It is obvious why someone would do this when they have no control. No one likes to feel helpless. Oddly, though, people will also try to use superstitious means to exert control over the world even when they do have control, but don’t like the kind of control that they have.

An example I used of naturalistic superstition is the attribution to vitamins of powers that they don’t actually have. Vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases, but they (or at least the known vitamins) are building blocks for processes that go on in the body, not regulatory hormones. Once we have enough, further intake of them doesn’t do anything. (Unlike, for example, anabolic steroids.) Take vitamin C for example. If you don’t have enough, your body doesn’t have all of the building blocks it needs for your immune system to function well, and you get sick easily. Once you get enough vitamin C, that part of your immune system can be built to full capacity and it will function as well as it can. However, there are other things that go into one’s immune system, one of the big ones being getting enough sleep. But getting enough sleep is hard, while taking extra vitamin C is easy. By putting enough superstitious weight onto the power of vitamin C to boost their immune system a person can fool himself into believing that he’s compensating for a chronic lack of sleep. The person does have the control that he wants. The problem is that he doesn’t want it that way. So they he invents another way to (pretend to) have that control so that he can feel like he’s exercising control without the hard work of actually doing it.

Another common place I’ve seen this is organic food. Organic food may be more dense in micro-nutrients than conventionally grown food is. (I suspect it depends greatly on the particular organic farm vs. the particular conventional farm.) But if we suppose, for the sake of argument, that organic food is more micro-nutrient dense than conventional food, and is therefore healthier, the difference may be measurable, but it is not huge. Moreover, while there may be a difference in micro-nutrient content, what no one disputes is that there is no significant difference in macro-nutrient content. That is, organic cane sugar may or may not have more zinc, copper, iron, and manganese than conventional cane sugar. (Neither, in any event, has a ton of them.) What it most certainly does not have, and what no one suggests that it has, is less sugar. If you are eating a fixed amount of cane sugar, it may well be a little healthier to make it organic cane sugar. But that pales in comparison to the health benefits of eating less sugar (unless you already only eat very little sugar except for special occasions, which by definition are rare). But sugar tastes very, very good, so eating less sugar is hard.

So when you make lemonade you use organic cane sugar instead of conventional cane sugar, or coconut sugar instead of cane sugar, or use honey instead of coconut sugar, or use honey with pollen in it instead of filtered honey. There are natural explanations you can put forward for why those are better than the alternative sugar, and that’s not identical with the supernatural explanation for why using holy water to make your lemonade will protect you from all of the sugar in it, but in both cases you’re using some means you have no reason to suppose will achieve the effect you want in order to avoid achieving the effect by means you know are reliable—in this case, not drinking the lemonade.

Once you start looking for this pattern, you’ll notice it’s all over the place. People frequently prefer easy means that don’t actually work to difficult means that do—when the effect is uncertain or won’t happen for a while. People are a lot less superstitious about what prevents one from slipping on ice while they’re walking on ice. People are almost never superstitious about what will slake their thirst when they’re thirsty. I’ve never yet heard of a man who was superstitious about what will keep his hands from getting burned while he’s taking a pan out of the oven.

But when there’s any plausibility that the easier means will work—well, human beings are often lazy.