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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: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 28 2016, @03:36AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday November 28 2016, @03:36AM (#433898) Journal

    In this case it sounds like they weren't even required to list the ingredients, so they happily lied about it and increased their profits.

    Here's the thing -- even if they DO list ingredients, there are more and more companies using ingredients lists for to mislead if not outright deceive.

    I recall a few years back when a family member came home with a bunch of "natural" cleaning products, soaps, etc. Since I know a little about chemistry, I was curious about some of the vague ingredients listed, which said something like "natural plant-based [chemical category]" or whatever. They didn't list specific chemicals, but rather broader chemical categories. So I went to the product websites and finally found links to the FULL ingredients list -- where it became clear that these products were basically the same as the "standard" (non-"natural") cleaning products, just without the scary chemical names. Yes, they might leave out a few "artificial" fragrances and substitute some other ones instead, but I found a number of products that were basically marketing the same stuff to unsuspecting customers for 3 times the price just by putting "natural" or "plant-based" in front of ingredient names, and avoiding the full chemical names on the label. Well, I don't actually think it was the same stuff, since these "natural" products often seem to work slightly worse -- my guess is that they just dilute it a bit, so no one expects anything. After all, we all expect the "natural" stuff to be not quite as good at cleaning, no?

    And the thing about these sorts of "natural plant-based" ingredients is that when you're basically including a plant-based processed version of a manufactured chemical, it may be as pure as one manufactured by artificial processes. You couldn't even do a basic chemical test in some cases to distinguish the two. So, how many such "natural" products are just the same old crap charging 2-4 times the price?

    But I think the prize for innovative ingredient lists should go to whoever thought up "evaporated organic cane juice" as an ingredient! I first discovered this a few years back when a loving grandparent bought my then fairly young child some "Greek-style" yogurt, thinking this brand would be "natural" and wonderful -- and which prominently said "NO SUGAR ADDED" on the label. Yogurt is "healthy" after all. As I was picking up a spoon of it to serve it to my kid, I had a taste, and it was sickeningly sweet. (I should note that I don't particularly like sweets, nor did my kid back then, which is probably why he was rejecting it. He, like me, actually just preferred plain yogurt.)

    So, I looked on the back, because it seemed sweeter than fruit would normally make it. And indeed, in one of the first ingredients was "evaporated organic cane juice." It's "organic" and "juice," so it must be good for you, right?!?

    It took me only a second to say, "Huh... if you take sugar cane juice and evaporate the liquid, what do you end up with?" Yep -- sugar. But "no added sugar" was prominently displayed on the label.

    I looked at the sugar content listed in the dietary summary -- this stuff had more sugar per ounce than Coca-Cola, most of it added in the form of "evaporated cane juice."

    Now, I know there's some skeptic out there who's going to tell me, "Well, they aren't claiming a chemical analysis here -- 'evaporated cane juice' is processed in slightly different ways from sugar, and it has traces of molasses, which are removed from white sugar." Yes, that's true. But when you say "no sugar added," most people don't assume you've basically dumped about six packets of "Sugar in the Raw" into your small serving of yogurt, which is basically equivalent. A substituted ingredient that is 99% sugar shouldn't disguise the fact that you're adding sugar.

    This yogurt company had a class-action lawsuit over this labeling a few years later, though it was eventually dismissed. That led the FDA this year to finally suggest they start simply calling it "sugar" [npr.org], though for now it's still voluntary.

    That's not the only disguised ingredient, of course. Sugar is packaged in all sorts of ways for kids foods, since apparently some parents have discovered that it's bad when "sugar" is the second ingredient on the list. Hence you get crap like "organic brown rice syrup" or "agave nectar" or "barley malt syrup" or "fruit concentrates" like apple or grape.

    I know some "natural foods" folks will tell me, "But that's better than eating processed white sugar!" Perhaps. A little bit. Personally, I'd prefer my food to mostly have a lot less sugar than seems to be standard. Yet the companies keep figuring out new ways to "hide" it. (And let's be honest -- that's what they're doing. Nobody in the food industry seriously believes that if you load up a breakfast "bar" with "organic brown rice syrup" instead of white sugar that it's magically going to become "healthy." They just want to cater to a population that likes incredibly sweet things, but they don't want that population to feel as bad about eating it.) And that's just hidden sugars... we could talk about the distortion of other ingredients some other time.

    Bottom line -- don't trust ingredients lists. They've become a place for advertising and distorting the contents.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 28 2016, @07:12PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 28 2016, @07:12PM (#434151) Journal

    Actually, making sugar is more complicated than just evaporating the juice. It takes work to get it to crystallize properly. This doesn't affect your basic point, but evaporated cane juice is probably easier to make...and perhaps less pure. After all, white sugar was originally invented as a health food.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 2) by Nollij on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:16AM

    by Nollij (4559) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:16AM (#434326)

    There are a disturbingly high number of people that believe simply replacing HFCS with plain sugar makes anything infinitely healthier.
    You can see this marketed in the various "natural" and "organic" brands all across your local grocery.