  We investigate nonperturbative aspects of the interplay of chiral transitions
in the standard model in the course of the renormalization flow. We focus on
the chiral symmetry breaking mechanisms provided by the QCD and the electroweak
sectors, the latter of which we model by a Higgs-top-bottom Yukawa theory. The
interplay becomes quantitatively accessible by accounting for the
fluctuation-induced mixing of the electroweak Higgs field with the mesonic
composite fields of QCD. In fact, our approach uses dynamical bosonization and
treats these scalar fields on the same footing. Varying the QCD scale relative
to the Fermi scale we quantify the mutual impact of the symmetry-breaking
mechanisms, specifically the departure from the second order quantum phase
transition of the pure Yukawa sector in favor of a crossover upon the inclusion
of the gauge interactions. This allows to discuss the ``naturalness'' of the
standard model in terms of a pseudo-critical exponent which we determine as a
function of the ratio of the QCD and the Fermi scale. We also estimate the
minimum value of the $W$ boson mass in absence of the Higgs mechanism.
