I’ve never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.
Can we start doing this with everything?
The problem is a lot of nasty things come from less scary sounding things. For example:
Ingredient: Ricin, Where it comes from: Castor beans, What it’s used for: Poison.
I assume there’s a better example to make your point because at least here you’re explicitly stating ricin is used for poison, an objectively good thing to know.
My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn’t tell you if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I could have rephrased “what it’s used for” to be “laxative”. A true statement which doesn’t expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.
People are biased to think “chemical name bad, common name good” and that’s the problem I’m exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.
I wish. That would be rad.
Inb4 food corporations go: Water - water - extra weight for cheap
JFC can we make this list obligatory on all products?
It’s so amazing to finally just read in plain English what an ingredient is supposed to be doing.
Maybe even add a few columns?
Peanut butter:
- ingredient: Peanut
- Where it comes from: Peanut
- What it does: Peanut?
What it does: adhesive (sticks to the roof of your mouth)
I would like to see this but for laws as well. Just cut down all that self-important job security and say what it is in plain english
There is actually a law for that (in the US)(apologies for linking to a currently fascist source)
“Spices, natural and artificial flavors”
Mmm tastes like freedom and definitely not a corporate hellscape.
In Europe it is necessary that all food products contain such a list of all ingredients.
Example: Coke ZERO. Ingredients: Water, carbonic acid, colorant E150d, souring agent phosphate acid, sweetening agent (sodium cyclamate, acesulfam K, aspartam), natural flavor, flavor coffeine, acid regulator sodium citrate.
I translated that by hand so it probably contains mistakes.
Hey it’s me!
Get back in the toothpaste!
Well unfortunately once they’re out of the tube…
You’re one of my favourite terpenes
Note that products derived from palm oil should be avoided if you can. https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/8-things-know-about-palm-oil
That article you linked seems to be saying that palm oil is actually really good?
It says that it is a major driver of deforestation because people are tearing down trees to grow more of it because it’s a very useful and versatile oil.
It later says that switching away from palm oil isn’t a solution because palm oil is actually such an efficient crop that if you used something else the amount of land needed to produce enough oil would drive far more deforestation.
The article is a call for more regulation on deforestation, not a call to not use palm oil. It in fact almost argues the opposite.
It’s not just deforestation, especially in Orangutan habitats that are endangered. They are also rife with forced labor, ie slave labor. They lure desperate foreigners with promises of good jobs, baiting and switching them with a life of slavery doing hard, very hard labor, including kids. The families can sometimes bail them out by paying several thousand dollars, a lot of money to these impoverished bangladeshis and Indians and the like.
Many of the desparate migrants that can speak english well are now sold to chinese gangs to run romance scams from slave compounds, a 40 billion dollar a year industry just in S. Asia they figure now, pig butchering and the like.
For sure. But the problem isn’t palm oil itself, which seems like something of a miracle plant when compared to other sources of vegetable oil. It’s that the supply chain for it is rife with abuse. Similar to coffee, or honestly, most things that are harvested predominantly in poorer countries with less oversight.
But, like coffee, it seems there are organizations that certify certain palm oil suppliers as “cruelty free,” so it’s probably better to try and hunt those out in favor of foregoing palm oil entirely, which seems like a pretty incredible product otherwise.
Even aside from environmental impacts, palm kernel oil is actually really bad for your cholesterol levels. It’s used as a filler in a lot of foods (many peanut butters, for example).
If you decide not buy the omnicidal product because palm oil is an ingredient, that’s good.
Unfortunately only a tiny fraction of people are ethical. The rest are not just unknowingly buying products containing palm oil, but are actively choosing to speed-run us towards a mass-extinction event.
Fair point.
This has to be a response to those idiot tictokers wandering grocery stores and badmouthing anything with an ingredient they can’t pronounce. Usually shilling some sort of scam supplement while they’re at it.
Judging from the text on the left, with it not doing animal testing etc., it looks like it targets more ‘conscious’ consumers in general…
I’m definitely bad mouthing the goddamn palm oil.
I would love if all companys did this
Note that products made with aqua contain dihydrogen monoxide
That’s a chemical. It’s also an acid: To some, it’s better known as hydroxic acid.
It has the highest pH of any known acid!
Hahahah, I guess that depends on which definition of acid you want to go with.
May contain traces of dihydrogen monoxide
Remember when toothpaste came with microplastics, on purpose?
https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/myth-buster-toothpaste-still-contains-plastic-ingredients/)
I wish more products would do this. It’s super interesting.
Imagine this on a bar of chocolate. Ingredient: cocoa powder, what it does: flavouring, where it comes from: child labour and exploitation.
I hate to rain on a parade, but it’s marketing bullshit. Aqua comes from water, isn’t it? Purified one at that? “Vegetable”? Calcium fluoride is a source? “Natural ore” as opposed to an artificial lab grown ore?
It kinda looks nice unless you actually read it, or know what words mean. And if you do it’s obvious ploy to capture very ignorant people.I think you’re reading it too pessimistically. There are so many people out there saying, “If you can’t pronounce it or know where it’s from, then it’s straight POISON!”
There are artificial ores. There are people who will want to know the water they used was clean (the purified water). This looks like a great way to educate people on what they’re using and to learn not to be afraid of big, complicated words.
It kinda looks nice unless you actually read it, or know what words mean.
Teaching children is pointless because it might look nice, but if you already know the stuff then you would recognize that it’s all fairly trivial, well-known stuff. No reason to point it out.
You just demonstrated that you actually don’t know what words mean.
What, you don’t feel more informed to know that your glycerin comes from a miscellaneous vegetable?
Natural ore made me laugh. I mean, asbestos and beryllium are naturally occurring ores too…
I bet asbestos would make for a killer toothpaste, actually.
Mmm, peppermint
squirts the entire tube into my mouth
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Need to find one without any palm oil, boycott palm oil.
Also where is the wintergreen?
I have bad news about the first ingredient, calcium carbonate.
It contains lead!Edited for clarity: it is derived from chalk as the toothpaste explains and effectively all chalk on Earth is contaminated with lead as shown in the article below, which uses x-ray fluorescence to confirm the presence of lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic.
In general, you want to avoid the following ingredients in your toothpaste if you are trying to minimize lead exposure:
- Bentonite Clay
- Hydroxyapatite
- Calcium Carbonate
- Hydrated Silica
- Titanium Dioxide
I question their methods if they’re also afraid of fluoride
More like “the chalk the calcium carbonate comes from is contaminated with lead,” interpreting your claim as charitably as possible. Calcium carbonate is the specific chemical compound CaCO3; if Pb is present it’s a different compound entirely.
Moreover, I highly doubt that every possible commercial source of chalk is contaminated with lead, so unless you can tell which specific product this is just from the picture and know that it’s been tested by that site, you can’t make that claim in the absolute language you used.
And even then, that’s assuming the site itself is credible.
Yeah that’s pretty much exactly what I’m saying. I just didn’t really feel like typing it all out. Yes the claim there is effectively all chalk is contaminated with lead based on all of the different XRF results she’s done on toothpaste.
Kind of like how basically all cocoa beans are contaminated with lead and cadmium as shown by consumer reports. The beans themselves do not contain lead, but the countries that harvest the beans just throw them on the ground and the ground is contaminated with lead and the dust gets on the beans and makes its way into our dark chocolate.
this is a joke, right?
how would anybody take that website seriously? it screams “hit back, never return, and forget I exist”
Weird kneejerk. What specifically is wrong with their methods of research?
I’m not talking about their methods. I’m talking about the presentation.
Ah, indeed, that’s certainly the correct approach to any scientific info.
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Just to check, you definitely use the same criterion when you read about a dude measuring stuff with a multimeter, right?
uh, yes? do you seriously think presentation is not a part of it?
Explain to me how the presentation affects whether there’s lead in toothpaste.
oh, you’re just intentionally playing stupid. got it.
LEAD SAFE MAMMA LLC AMAZON AFFILIATE LINK………nah I’m good. You’re being scammed.
You probably aren’t aware, but x-ray fluorescence guns cost like $20,000 so I can understand why she would have an Amazon affiliate link
This is such a pointless thing to take umbrage with. Looking at the table showing the levels and picking one of the highest ones from a brand I’ve heard of: Colgate Total Whitening comes in at 539 ppb of lead. We’ll call that 0.539 ppm to make the maths slightly easier, because that’s equivalent to μg/g.
Let’s say you really load up your toothbrush and use 2ml instead of a pea-sized blob, and assuming a specific gravity of 1.30, that’s 2.6g of toothpaste, of which 0.539 μg/g is lead. So you would ingest 2.6g × 0.539μg/g = 1.3936μg of lead if you swallowed all of that toothpaste every time you brushed your teeth.
Apparently young children swallow 0.053-0.3g of toothpaste, so let’s go roughly in the middle and say you swallow 0.18g, so 0.18 × 0.539 = 0.097μg of lead. Call that 0.1μg and you brush twice a day, so 0.2μg of lead per day from brushing your teeth. If you use a pea-sized amount, then halve that to 0.1μg.
The EPA’s maximum allowable limit of lead in drinking water is 15ppb, but is lowering to 10ppb (ppb = μg/litre) in 2027. So let’s say you live somewhere well below that limit and it’s 5ppb in your area. You’re supposed to drink 1.5 to 2 litres of water a day, so at 5μg/litre that’s 7.5 to 10μg of lead per day from drinking water, or 75 to 100 times more than the amount from brushing your teeth.
Thank you very much for doing the math! That really does put it into perspective.
I was assuming you would still be absorbing the lead through your gum line and sublingually through the glands under your tongue into your bloodstream even without swallowing any, but that does sound like extremely low quantities.
For me personally, I have ADHD and a bad memory so anything I can do to mitigate exposure to lead to lessen my chance of developing Alzheimer’s or Dementia as I get older seemed like an obvious decision especially when the solution is to just get a low abrasion toothpaste that doesn’t include these potentially contaminated abrasive materials.
Fennel?!
huPBlarrrgh! 🤮
