I’ve never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.
Hey it’s me!
Get back in the toothpaste!
Well unfortunately once they’re out of the tube…
Can we start doing this with everything?
When I was a kid, in my country all machinery and electronics were accompanied with full mechanical and electrical schematics.
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.
Either that or it creates an incentive to use fewer, simpler ingredients.
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 line
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.
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
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?
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…
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?
“Spices, natural and artificial flavors”
Mmm tastes like freedom and definitely not a corporate hellscape.
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.
Love me some open source hygiene products! Blueland, the company that makes the cleaning sprays I use, does the same thing.
But where does calcium fluoride come from?..
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.
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.
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!
