good luck getting the electrical scheme of a current CPU
not because they're secret, but because they're pointless. you wouldn't understand anything from such a schematic. it's way too complicated, and has to be broken down with lots of extra annotations to be comprehensible.
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 line
this is one of those things where distributed ledger would be useful as it should at least track chain of custody then there should be enough room left over for the ingredients table.
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
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).
If you decide not buy the omnicidal product because palm oil is an ingredient, that's good.
Unfortunately only a tiny fraction of people are ethical. The rest are not just unknowingly buying products containing palm oil, but are actively choosing to speed-run us towards a mass-extinction event.
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.
Palm oil actually takes up less land than other crops that can produce that type of oil.
I think this is a little bit of a false equivalence, though. A hectare of borneo jungle ≠ a hectare of Saskatchewan prairie. It's probably an impossible thing to accurately calculate, but I'd like to see kind of control for ecological cost. E.g. is 1 hectare of borneo as important to the earth as 2 hectares of prairie?
It also seems a bit obvious that an ecosystem on the equator would be capable of greater production than one closer to the poles. It always bothers me when people compare like "x crop takes 2 times as much water as y crop" when crop x might be grown somewhere that water isnt an issue.
Yes, but palm oil is a hard fat, it's used for cookies and anywhere that needs to be solid. alternatives are coconut oil and butter. Neither are better in yield vs land use.
But if butter can be produced in abundant habitat like the midwest prairie instead of threatened species-dense places like Borneo’s jungle, I’d prefer to go with the higher land use but ultimately less ecologically destructive option.
Palm oil does what palm oil does. And it's useful in food manufacturing because you can create the same products without using butter or transfats. That's pretty much the only reason it gets so heavily used.
But the actual alternative to palm oils is to stop consuming or manufacturing products using palm oil. That means some products should just be pulled from the market. Oreos, for example.
For solid fats there is no alternative crop growing in northern regions, it is either palm oil, coconut oil (similar regions), or butter. Butter is much more expensive and has other issues. Best thing to do is eat less crappy snacks that need those solid fats, like cookies and such. Without the need for cheap ingredients we would not grow it. But if we do need it, there is no easy alternative
In my country at least, there's a conspiracy theory, that claims citric acid is a toxic acid invented by the nazis then given the name to link it to a healthy and alkalizing (!!!) fruit.
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.
Deionized water is very often used as an ingredient in many cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. "Aqua" is the standard name for water in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients standard, which is mandatory on product labels in some countries.
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.
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.
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.
I think you're reading it too pessimistically. There are so many people out there saying, "If you can't pronounce it or know where it's from, then it's straight POISON!"
There are artificial ores. There are people who will want to know the water they used was clean (the purified water). This looks like a great way to educate people on what they're using and to learn not to be afraid of big, complicated words.
It kinda looks nice unless you actually read it, or know what words mean.
Teaching children is pointless because it might look nice, but if you already know the stuff then you would recognize that it's all fairly trivial, well-known stuff. No reason to point it out.
Sure, this is still a marketing strategy that could be exploited by bad corps, but it is a step in the right direction. This is where rules to define those terms accurately would be a good use of regulations.
It's homeopathic nonsense. None of those are accepted names for the substances they are talking about, and they don't specify a quantity so it could be essentially zero for some of them.
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:
More like "the chalk the calcium carbonate comes from is contaminated with lead," interpreting your claim as charitably as possible. Calcium carbonate is the specific chemical compound CaCO3; if Pb is present it's a different compound entirely.
Moreover, I highly doubt that every possible commercial source of chalk is contaminated with lead, so unless you can tell which specific product this is just from the picture and know that it's been tested by that site, you can't make that claim in the absolute language you used.
And even then, that's assuming the site itself is credible.
Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I'm saying. I just didn't really feel like typing it all out. Yes the claim there is effectively all chalk is contaminated with lead based on all of the different XRF results she's done on toothpaste.
Kind of like how basically all cocoa beans are contaminated with lead and cadmium as shown by consumer reports. The beans themselves do not contain lead, but the countries that harvest the beans just throw them on the ground and the ground is contaminated with lead and the dust gets on the beans and makes its way into our dark chocolate.
Tums and similar antacids are almost entirely calcium carbonate. According to their website:
The active ingredient in TUMS is calcium carbonate from a mined calcium source. It may be an appropriate option for people who cannot consume calcium sourced from shellfish. Each tablet contains 1000 mg of calcium carbonate, 410 mg of elemental calcium, 5 mg of magnesium and 2 mg of sodium.
Mined and from shellfish sounds like chalk to me.
Sure enough, in their FAQ:
The calcium carbonate in TUMS antacid is processed from pure limestone, resulting in a high degree of purity.
Let's compare toothpaste, which one uses a small amount of twice a day and consumes (if old enough) almost nothing to an antacid made for occasional use but consumed in hundreds to thousands of milligrams at a time. Seems like there should be far more consumer concern about lead in antacids.
I found a paper about determining limits of lead detection in CaCO3, but they spiked lead into antacid tablets. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of concern out there about all this lead in chalk.
For what it's worth, the toothpastes that only used calcium carbonate had quite low levels of lead. It seemed to be the ones that use bentonite clay that have ridiculously high levels of lead and that is the far more concerning ingredient which was not present in OP's photo
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.
Thank you very much for doing the math! That really does put it into perspective.
I was assuming you would still be absorbing the lead through your gum line and sublingually through the glands under your tongue into your bloodstream even without swallowing any, but that does sound like extremely low quantities.
For me personally, I have ADHD and a bad memory so anything I can do to mitigate exposure to lead to lessen my chance of developing Alzheimer's or Dementia as I get older seemed like an obvious decision especially when the solution is to just get a low abrasion toothpaste that doesn't include these potentially contaminated abrasive materials.
Can we start doing this with everything?
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.
"Obsolete"
Also if a CPU breaks in any way, you can't fix it. Best to throw it away and get a new one.
Good thing is they basically never break, anyways.
good luck getting the electrical scheme of a current CPU
not because they're secret, but because they're pointless. you wouldn't understand anything from such a schematic. it's way too complicated, and has to be broken down with lots of extra annotations to be comprehensible.
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.
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 line
Maximum 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.
this is one of those things where distributed ledger would be useful as it should at least track chain of custody then there should be enough room left over for the ingredients table.
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
To be fair here though, how much toothpaste do you dry and snort these days?
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
I wish. That would be rad.
Inb4 food corporations go: Water - water - extra weight for cheap
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:
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
There is actually a law for that (in the US)(apologies for linking to a currently fascist source)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/946
“Spices, natural and artificial flavors”
Mmm tastes like freedom and definitely not a corporate hellscape.
In Europe it is necessary that all food products contain such a list of all ingredients.
Example: Coke ZERO. Ingredients: Water, carbonic acid, colorant E150d, souring agent phosphate acid, sweetening agent (sodium cyclamate, acesulfam K, aspartam), natural flavor, flavor coffeine, acid regulator sodium citrate.
I translated that by hand so it probably contains mistakes.
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).
It grows great after you clear cut a very specific type of forest thats full of endangered stuff.
The oil itself is great.
If you decide not buy the omnicidal product because palm oil is an ingredient, that's good.
Unfortunately only a tiny fraction of people are ethical. The rest are not just unknowingly buying products containing palm oil, but are actively choosing to speed-run us towards a mass-extinction event.
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.
I think this is a little bit of a false equivalence, though. A hectare of borneo jungle ≠ a hectare of Saskatchewan prairie. It's probably an impossible thing to accurately calculate, but I'd like to see kind of control for ecological cost. E.g. is 1 hectare of borneo as important to the earth as 2 hectares of prairie?
It also seems a bit obvious that an ecosystem on the equator would be capable of greater production than one closer to the poles. It always bothers me when people compare like "x crop takes 2 times as much water as y crop" when crop x might be grown somewhere that water isnt an issue.
Yes, but palm oil is a hard fat, it's used for cookies and anywhere that needs to be solid. alternatives are coconut oil and butter. Neither are better in yield vs land use.
But if butter can be produced in abundant habitat like the midwest prairie instead of threatened species-dense places like Borneo’s jungle, I’d prefer to go with the higher land use but ultimately less ecologically destructive option.
Sure, it's an alternative. It's also much much more expensive and less healthy than palm oil (butter has more saturated fats and cholesterol).
Palm oil does what palm oil does. And it's useful in food manufacturing because you can create the same products without using butter or transfats. That's pretty much the only reason it gets so heavily used.
But the actual alternative to palm oils is to stop consuming or manufacturing products using palm oil. That means some products should just be pulled from the market. Oreos, for example.
But Oreos are mostly vegan and most of their competition uses babies in their recipes.
But why do we need to grow oil in these regions?
For solid fats there is no alternative crop growing in northern regions, it is either palm oil, coconut oil (similar regions), or butter. Butter is much more expensive and has other issues. Best thing to do is eat less crappy snacks that need those solid fats, like cookies and such. Without the need for cheap ingredients we would not grow it. But if we do need it, there is no easy alternative
Fair point.
Love me some open source hygiene products! Blueland, the company that makes the cleaning sprays I use, does the same thing.
https://www.blueland.com/products/multi-surface-starter-set?Scent=Fresh+Lemon&Refill+Quantity=2+Tablets
In my country at least, there's a conspiracy theory, that claims citric acid is a toxic acid invented by the nazis then given the name to link it to a healthy and alkalizing (!!!) fruit.
I never did trust the stuff.
I literally have a bottle of anhydrous citric acid crystals for cleaning. I lick them sometimes because they're sour!
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.
Judging from the text on the left, with it not doing animal testing etc., it looks like it targets more 'conscious' consumers in general...
I'm definitely bad mouthing the goddamn palm oil.
Why did they feel the need to church up “water”
Found this on Wikipedia:
Aqua is the actual word for water in spanish too.
this, i’ve seen “aqua” instead of water on pretty much every hygiene product i own
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.
It has the highest pH of any known acid!
Technically the majority of strong bases are also weak acids. Those have higher pH.
Hahahah, I guess that depends on which definition of acid you want to go with.
May contain traces of dihydrogen monoxide
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.
The Big Bang
“To bake a calcium fluoride, you must first invent the universe.”
It's a rock
https://www.amazon.com/Calcium-Fluoride-Fluorspar-Powder-98-5/dp/B07T8ZL29L/
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.
Need to find one without any palm oil, boycott palm oil.
Also where is the wintergreen?
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.
I think you're reading it too pessimistically. There are so many people out there saying, "If you can't pronounce it or know where it's from, then it's straight POISON!"
There are artificial ores. There are people who will want to know the water they used was clean (the purified water). This looks like a great way to educate people on what they're using and to learn not to be afraid of big, complicated words.
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.
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:
Sodium fluoride / stannous fluoride (lab-produced, though based on natural elements)
Artificial abrasives (engineered silica)
Detergents like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)
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.
Teaching children is pointless because it might look nice, but if you already know the stuff then you would recognize that it's all fairly trivial, well-known stuff. No reason to point it out.
You just demonstrated that you actually don't know what words mean.
Sure, this is still a marketing strategy that could be exploited by bad corps, but it is a step in the right direction. This is where rules to define those terms accurately would be a good use of regulations.
It's homeopathic nonsense. None of those are accepted names for the substances they are talking about, and they don't specify a quantity so it could be essentially zero for some of them.
I am still waking up, and read the title as "Toothpasta". 😰
Fennel?!
huPBlarrrgh! 🤮
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:
https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/
I question their methods if they're also afraid of fluoride
More like "the chalk the calcium carbonate comes from is contaminated with lead," interpreting your claim as charitably as possible. Calcium carbonate is the specific chemical compound CaCO
3; if Pb is present it's a different compound entirely.Moreover, I highly doubt that every possible commercial source of chalk is contaminated with lead, so unless you can tell which specific product this is just from the picture and know that it's been tested by that site, you can't make that claim in the absolute language you used.
And even then, that's assuming the site itself is credible.
Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I'm saying. I just didn't really feel like typing it all out. Yes the claim there is effectively all chalk is contaminated with lead based on all of the different XRF results she's done on toothpaste.
Kind of like how basically all cocoa beans are contaminated with lead and cadmium as shown by consumer reports. The beans themselves do not contain lead, but the countries that harvest the beans just throw them on the ground and the ground is contaminated with lead and the dust gets on the beans and makes its way into our dark chocolate.
Tums and similar antacids are almost entirely calcium carbonate. According to their website:
Mined and from shellfish sounds like chalk to me.
Sure enough, in their FAQ:
Let's compare toothpaste, which one uses a small amount of twice a day and consumes (if old enough) almost nothing to an antacid made for occasional use but consumed in hundreds to thousands of milligrams at a time. Seems like there should be far more consumer concern about lead in antacids.
I found a paper about determining limits of lead detection in CaCO3, but they spiked lead into antacid tablets. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of concern out there about all this lead in chalk.
For what it's worth, the toothpastes that only used calcium carbonate had quite low levels of lead. It seemed to be the ones that use bentonite clay that have ridiculously high levels of lead and that is the far more concerning ingredient which was not present in OP's photo
this is a joke, right?
how would anybody take that website seriously? it screams "hit back, never return, and forget I exist"
Weird kneejerk. What specifically is wrong with their methods of research?
I'm not talking about their methods. I'm talking about the presentation.
Ah, indeed, that's certainly the correct approach to any scientific info.
Just to check, you definitely use the same criterion when you read about a dude measuring stuff with a multimeter, right?
uh, yes? do you seriously think presentation is not a part of it?
Explain to me how the presentation affects whether there's lead in toothpaste.
oh, you're just intentionally playing stupid. got it.
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.
Thank you very much for doing the math! That really does put it into perspective.
I was assuming you would still be absorbing the lead through your gum line and sublingually through the glands under your tongue into your bloodstream even without swallowing any, but that does sound like extremely low quantities.
For me personally, I have ADHD and a bad memory so anything I can do to mitigate exposure to lead to lessen my chance of developing Alzheimer's or Dementia as I get older seemed like an obvious decision especially when the solution is to just get a low abrasion toothpaste that doesn't include these potentially contaminated abrasive materials.
LEAD SAFE MAMMA LLC AMAZON AFFILIATE LINK……..nah I’m good. You’re being scammed.
You probably aren't aware, but x-ray fluorescence guns cost like $20,000 so I can understand why she would have an Amazon affiliate link