Can we start doing this with everything?
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Inb4 food corporations go: Water - water - extra weight for cheap
When I was a kid, in my country all machinery and electronics were accompanied with full mechanical and electrical schematics.
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.
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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.
Either that or it creates an incentive to use fewer, simpler ingredients.
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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
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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.
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.
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
This is still an improvement, let's leave it at that.
Ingredient: Hydroxyl acid Where it comes from: Deep underground well What it's used for: Industrial solvent
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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?
Peanut butter:
- ingredient: Peanut
- Where it comes from: Peanut
- What it does: Peanut?
What it does: adhesive (sticks to the roof of your mouth)
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
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Hey it's me!
Get back in the toothpaste!
Well unfortunately once they're out of the tube...
You're one of my favourite terpenes
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
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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Love me some open source hygiene products! Blueland, the company that makes the cleaning sprays I use, does the same thing.
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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.
I'm definitely bad mouthing the goddamn palm oil.
Why did they feel the need to church up “water”
I would love if all companys did this
Note that products made with aqua contain dihydrogen monoxide
That's a chemical. It's also an acid: To some, it's better known as hydroxic acid.
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Remember when toothpaste came with microplastics, on purpose?
https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/myth-buster-toothpaste-still-contains-plastic-ingredients/)
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.
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I love it when companies do that. I have a couple of cosmetics products with such an explanation. I have very sensitive skin and this makes it easier to decide if I can use it.
Imagine this on a bar of chocolate. Ingredient: cocoa powder, what it does: flavouring, where it comes from: child labour and exploitation.
What brand of toothpaste is this?
It looks like kingfisher tube. They are well known for their toothpaste without flouride but also has with flouride.
Ingredients are probably listed like that because the target group cares about what they use.
I wish more products would do this. It's super interesting.
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