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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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28 2016, @01:45AM
Sham or not, if a manufacturer is allowed to lie about the main ingredients of their product, what else might other manufacturers be lying about if they can get away with chicanery of this magnitude? Why aren't they a smoking crater at the hands of the Federal Trade Commission? They are not making claims about the efficacy of their product (or if they are, they probably include the "quack Miranda warning [wikipedia.org]"), but they are making claims about what their product is made of. The fact that the claimed product demonstrably has none of the ingredient that they claim it is made of is a sign that someone is getting away with false advertising.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday November 28 2016, @10:31AM
Only in America...
Why aren't they a smoking crater at the hands of the Federal Trade Commission? /quote?
FWIW, this shit would get smacked down hard in Europe. We have rules about this kind of thing. If the ingredients list is found to be any way misleading, you can bet that the company responsible would be looking at major fines.
I would be very interested to see if these same manufacturers are selling the same products in the EU - and whether the contents and/or labelling are more honest in the EU than in the US.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday November 28 2016, @07:44PM
The part that drives me nuts, is that companies which are lying and defrauding in the US, can use that unfairly gained cash to go buy or dump prices on other companies in well regulated markets.
It's also true of the financial markets, where the higher taxation and state retirement systems in Europe mean there is less money sloshing around looking for a return, giving the US investors more firepower against civilized areas.
Free trade with countries dumping on labor costs is terrible for the poor, but free trade with predatory places like the US is bad for just about anyone with an advanced social system.