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posted by on Sunday November 27 2016, @10:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.

Bloomberg reports:

The aloe vera gel many Americans buy to soothe damaged skin contains no evidence of aloe vera at all.

Samples of store-brand aloe gel purchased at national retailers Wal-Mart, Target and CVS showed no indication of the plant in various lab tests. The products all listed aloe barbadensis leaf juice — another name for aloe vera — as either the No. 1 ingredient or No. 2 after water.

[...] Aloe’s three chemical markers — acemannan, malic acid and glucose — were absent in the tests for Wal-Mart, Target and CVS products conducted by a lab hired by Bloomberg News. The three samples contained a cheaper element called maltodextrin, a sugar sometimes used to imitate aloe. The gel that’s sold at another retailer, Walgreens, contained one marker, malic acid, but not the other two.

A related article from FatPhil discusses herbal supplements which, upon analysis, did not contain the ingredients their labels claimed.

Caveat emptor.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Sunday November 27 2016, @11:43PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Sunday November 27 2016, @11:43PM (#433827) Journal

    Read your link carefully again. It seems to say that there is some evidence that it does help for burns and other skin conditions when applied topically. It says that it's no good as sunblock. Evidence for whether taking it orally is any good for anything seems equivocal. It does not say that all the claims attributed to it are false and that it is ineffective or harmful, which I think is the definition of snake oil.

    Whatever the case the FTC has clearly dropped the ball here if someone is able to label their product 'aloe vera' without having any aloe vera at all.

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  • (Score: 2) by b on Monday November 28 2016, @12:22AM

    by b (2121) on Monday November 28 2016, @12:22AM (#433838)

    At best, I'd still interpret it as inconclusive. There's a lot of "might"s in there. I think that it's fairly easy to design a poorly-controlled experiment in any field, and very difficult to exclude (or even identify) all compounding factors. If some of the studies say there *is* a difference, then it's hard to know if they are the poorly-controlled ones. And/or just false positives from multiple hypothesis testing.

    Even if there really is some effect, then it's likely very minor, given that it's not readily identifiable from many of these studies.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday November 28 2016, @07:16PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 28 2016, @07:16PM (#434153) Journal

    "Snake oil" is an interesting example. There's some evidence the the original snake oil was actually the oil of a specific kind of Chinese snake that really did have some curative or palliative properties. (I believe it reduced inflamation.) The "snake oil" sold by the travelling salesmen of the US West, however, typically didn't contain *ANY* snake oil, which makes it an excellent description of the "Aloe Vera" ointments being discussed.

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