I've never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.

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

Can we start doing this with everything?

I wish. That would be rad.

Fair point.

Remember when toothpaste came with microplastics, on purpose?

https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/myth-buster-toothpaste-still-contains-plastic-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.

Mmm, peppermint

squirts the entire tube into my mouth

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.

That is not really true and is more fear mongering. Palm oil is much better than any alternative that can be grown in the same regions. The issue is not palm oil but amount of consumption. Palm oil actually takes up less land than other crops that can produce that type of oil.

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.

Need to find one without any palm oil, boycott palm oil.

Also where is the wintergreen?

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.

Note that products made with aqua contain dihydrogen monoxide

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).

Imagine this on a bar of chocolate. Ingredient: cocoa powder, what it does: flavouring, where it comes from: child labour and exploitation.

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.

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?

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.

Ingredient: Hydroxyl acid
Where it comes from: Deep underground well
What it's used for: Industrial solvent

This is still an improvement, let's leave it at that.

Palm oil is much better than any alternative

Palm oil does what palm oil does. And it's useful in food manufacturing because you can create the same products without using butter or transfats. That's pretty much the only reason it gets so heavily used.

But the actual alternative to palm oils is to stop consuming or manufacturing products using palm oil. That means some products should just be pulled from the market. Oreos, for example.

Why did they feel the need to church up “water”

It grows great after you clear cut a very specific type of forest thats full of endangered stuff.

The oil itself is great.

There's historical truth to this. In toothpaste, no less.

Ingredient: Asbestos

Comes from: naturally occurring mineral

Used for: mild abrasive

But Oreos are mostly vegan and most of their competition uses babies in their recipes.

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.

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

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

https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/

I question their methods if they're also afraid of fluoride

Palm oil actually takes up less land than other crops that can produce that type of oil.

I think this is a little bit of a false equivalence, though. A hectare of borneo jungle ≠ a hectare of Saskatchewan prairie. It's probably an impossible thing to accurately calculate, but I'd like to see kind of control for ecological cost. E.g. is 1 hectare of borneo as important to the earth as 2 hectares of prairie?

It also seems a bit obvious that an ecosystem on the equator would be capable of greater production than one closer to the poles. It always bothers me when people compare like "x crop takes 2 times as much water as y crop" when crop x might be grown somewhere that water isnt an issue.

this is a joke, right?

how would anybody take that website seriously? it screams "hit back, never return, and forget I exist"

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 CaCO~3~; 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.

That's a chemical. It's also an acid: To some, it's better known as hydroxic acid.

Either that or it creates an incentive to use fewer, simpler ingredients.

It has the highest pH of any known acid!

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.

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.

Hahahah, I guess that depends on which definition of acid you want to go with.

To be fair here though, how much toothpaste do you dry and snort these days?

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.

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

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.

Technically the majority of strong bases are also weak acids. Those have higher pH.

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.

Hey it's me!

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