I’ve never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.
I wish more products would do this. It’s super interesting.
Can we start doing this with everything?
Inb4 food corporations go: Water - water - extra weight for cheap
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.
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 lineMaximum 4296 alphanumeric characters, but that’s with the largest-sized code and low/no error correction (so not always practical).
And with only the English alphabet, just like in the good old days of ASCII.
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.
There’s historical truth to this. In toothpaste, no less.
Ingredient: Asbestos
Comes from: naturally occurring mineral
Used for: mild abrasive
Hey it’s me!
Get back in the toothpaste!
Mmm, peppermint
squirts the entire tube into my mouth
I hate to rain on a parade, but it’s marketing bullshit. Aqua comes from water, isn’t it? Purified one at that? “Vegetable”? Calcium fluoride is a source? “Natural ore” as opposed to an artificial lab grown ore?
It kinda looks nice unless you actually read it, or know what words mean. And if you do it’s obvious ploy to capture very ignorant people.You can find those things out. Natural ore means it comes from natural deposits (its not a lab-formulated compound).
Some people prefer natural ingredients. Thats it.
Otherwise its very common with synthetic or refined chemical ingredients in toothpaste, like:
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Sodium fluoride / stannous fluoride (lab-produced, though based on natural elements)
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Artificial abrasives (engineered silica)
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Detergents like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)
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Synthetic preservatives, flavors, or colorants
Same reason people want to grow their own food. They know whats in it and what they put in their body.
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What, you don’t feel more informed to know that your glycerin comes from a miscellaneous vegetable?
Natural ore made me laugh. I mean, asbestos and beryllium are naturally occurring ores too…
I bet asbestos would make for a killer toothpaste, actually.
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
This is such a pointless thing to take umbrage with. Looking at the table showing the levels and picking one of the highest ones from a brand I’ve heard of: Colgate Total Whitening comes in at 539 ppb of lead. We’ll call that 0.539 ppm to make the maths slightly easier, because that’s equivalent to μg/g.
Let’s say you really load up your toothbrush and use 2ml instead of a pea-sized blob, and assuming a specific gravity of 1.30, that’s 2.6g of toothpaste, of which 0.539 μg/g is lead. So you would ingest 2.6g × 0.539μg/g = 1.3936μg of lead if you swallowed all of that toothpaste every time you brushed your teeth.
Apparently young children swallow 0.053-0.3g of toothpaste, so let’s go roughly in the middle and say you swallow 0.18g, so 0.18 × 0.539 = 0.097μg of lead. Call that 0.1μg and you brush twice a day, so 0.2μg of lead per day from brushing your teeth. If you use a pea-sized amount, then halve that to 0.1μg.
The EPA’s maximum allowable limit of lead in drinking water is 15ppb, but is lowering to 10ppb (ppb = μg/litre) in 2027. So let’s say you live somewhere well below that limit and it’s 5ppb in your area. You’re supposed to drink 1.5 to 2 litres of water a day, so at 5μg/litre that’s 7.5 to 10μg of lead per day from drinking water, or 75 to 100 times more than the amount from brushing your teeth.
