I’ve never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.
I love it when companies do that. I have a couple oft cosmetics products with such an explanation. I habe very sensitive skin and this makes it easier to decide if I can use it.
I would love if all companys did this
Can we start doing this with everything?
I wish. That would be rad.
When I was a kid, in my country all machinery and electronics were accompanied with full mechanical and electrical schematics.
A lot of times it’s because those things required maintenance, and it was possible to do with basic tools.
Most things these days aren’t built with maintenance in mind, mostly because they’re obsolete before they need to be fixed.
There are certainly things that doesn’t apply to, but for a lot of consumer products, it is.
“Obsolete”
ingredient lables can be pretty long. I think we need a QR code with this and much more information. it should be able to back track where you product came from and such.
Can QRs fit enough text to hold all the ingredients and their descriptions?
I’d hate it if they were just links to some crappy government website that’ll inevitably go down couple of years down the linethis is one of those things where distributed ledger would be useful as it should at least track chain of custody then there should be enough room left over for the ingredients table.
Maximum 4296 alphanumeric characters, but that’s with the largest-sized code and low/no error correction (so not always practical).
And with only the English alphabet, just like in the good old days of ASCII.
Either that or it creates an incentive to use fewer, simpler ingredients.
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.
Ingredient: Hydroxyl acid Where it comes from: Deep underground well What it’s used for: Industrial solvent
There’s historical truth to this. In toothpaste, no less.
Ingredient: Asbestos
Comes from: naturally occurring mineral
Used for: mild abrasive
To be fair here though, how much toothpaste do you dry and snort these days?
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.
This is still an improvement, let’s leave it at that.
The calculus here isn’t strictly whether it’s “healthy” or not. There are quite a few ingredients that can be derived from both plants and petroleum, for example, and I would choose the one derived from plants every time
Remember when toothpaste came with microplastics, on purpose?
https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/myth-buster-toothpaste-still-contains-plastic-ingredients/)
Mmm, peppermint
squirts the entire tube into my mouth
Need to find one without any palm oil, boycott palm oil.
Also where is the wintergreen?
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.
Hahahah, I guess that depends on which definition of acid you want to go with.
It has the highest pH of any known acid!
Technically the majority of strong bases are also weak acids. Those have higher pH.
Fennel?!
huPBlarrrgh! 🤮
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?
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)
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.
“Spices, natural and artificial flavors”
Mmm tastes like freedom and definitely not a corporate hellscape.
Peanut butter:
- ingredient: Peanut
- Where it comes from: Peanut
- What it does: Peanut?
What it does: adhesive (sticks to the roof of your mouth)
Imagine this on a bar of chocolate. Ingredient: cocoa powder, what it does: flavouring, where it comes from: child labour and exploitation.
Why did they feel the need to church up “water”
Found this on Wikipedia:
Deionized water is very often used as an ingredient in many cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. “Aqua” is the standard name for water in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients standard, which is mandatory on product labels in some countries.
this, i’ve seen “aqua” instead of water on pretty much every hygiene product i own
Aqua is the actual word for water in spanish too.
But where does calcium fluoride come from?..
It’s a rock
If you bring calcium within sniffing distance of fluorine, you get calcium fluoride… just make sure you don’t have anything else close to the fluorine, including you.
Also, it’s basically just mined and purified as-is, it’s pretty common.
The Big Bang
“To bake a calcium fluoride, you must first invent the universe.”
I have bad news about the first ingredient, calcium carbonate. It contains lead!
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 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.
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.
“Is it in a serious, reliable publication” is indeed a good first question to ask yourself when trying to determine if something is scientific information or just some rando’s personal opinion.
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.
I question their methods if they’re also afraid of fluoride
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
Tums and similar antacids are almost entirely calcium carbonate. According to their website:
The active ingredient in TUMS is calcium carbonate from a mined calcium source. It may be an appropriate option for people who cannot consume calcium sourced from shellfish. Each tablet contains 1000 mg of calcium carbonate, 410 mg of elemental calcium, 5 mg of magnesium and 2 mg of sodium.
Mined and from shellfish sounds like chalk to me.
Sure enough, in their FAQ:
The calcium carbonate in TUMS antacid is processed from pure limestone, resulting in a high degree of purity.
Let’s compare toothpaste, which one uses a small amount of twice a day and consumes (if old enough) almost nothing to an antacid made for occasional use but consumed in hundreds to thousands of milligrams at a time. Seems like there should be far more consumer concern about lead in antacids.
I found a paper about determining limits of lead detection in CaCO3, but they spiked lead into antacid tablets. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of concern out there about all this lead in chalk.
I wish more products would do this. It’s super interesting.
I am still waking up, and read the title as “Toothpasta”. 😰
