Evolving Wellness^TM

Practical Applications and Information for Optimal Health and Living Naturally

How to Understand Personal Product Labels - Part 1

Published

on Mar 31, 2008

in Personal Care Products, Product Labeling

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Many products today still claim to be natural, but aren’t, so how can you tell the difference between the real and the fakes?

As part of Evolving Wellness’ mission we believe everyone should be able to know what is in their products by knowing how to read and how to understand all product labels. Since there is so much to say and understand about this topic, what I thought we would do is cover this topic piece by piece in a series of short tutorials.

Today in Part 1 let’s start with the core of natural products and that is recognizing and understanding plant ingredients.

Labeling Background

The general rule of thumb I heard about, for making a decision on whether something is natural versus synthetic was “if you can pronounce it, then you can use it”. This rule however does not work that well as many plant names on labels go by their biological names which are actually quite hard to pronounce as they are in Latin. So we therefore need another rule right? Well here is the sad news, there isn’t one!

There is unfortunately no quick and easy way to know your labels. And reading and believing the front labels of products or their names is out of the question for assessing their safety or quality as manufacturer’s can say almost anything here. You have to look at the ingredient lists.

What is troubling is that many countries do not even have laws yet for mandatory ingredient labeling. For example did you know that up to 2006 it was voluntary for a company to state its ingredients on personal care products in Canada? Can you imagine, up until recently most products did not even give you an option of knowing what is in them. But finally change came about and now nearly every personal care product has to be labeled with ingredients (small exceptions still apply). Europe and the United States have already had these laws in place for years.

The European Union has right now probably one of the best labeling laws on the planet. Not only have they labeled their products properly for years but in 2004 they toughened their label laws to also include whether a product contained a known or suspected carcinogen.

TUTORIAL 1: How to recognize and understand plant ingredients on personal product labels

As plant ingredients come from living specimens we have to cover a bit of biology first.

The Plant Kingdom is one of 6 Kingdoms of living species. Anything that is a living species is named according to the Binomial Nomenclature System. This system was first developed by a man named Carolus Linnaeus back in the 1700’s. The purpose of this system was to classify or group all species on Earth.

Well, even though that was a long time ago, the system was a good one and is internationally recognized to this day. However since it did originate back in the 1700’s when Latin was the language of education among other things. The species names are in Latin and hence difficult for anyone today to recognize. It was not renamed or translated as you would expect to remain internationally recognized. Therefore just by using the biological name, a species can be recognized anywhere in the world, where as if I want to use its common name like coconut, I would need to translate it depending on where in the world I was.

Why do you need to know this?

The reason that you should be familiar with this system is because many manufacturers use the biological name of the plant species only, as opposed to its common name. Some manufacturers put both names; one in brackets, the other as is and some only use the common name.

For example:

In an ingredient list I may see:

Helianthus annuus

OR

Helianthus annuus (Sunflower oil)

OR

Sunflower oil (Helianthus annuus)

OR

Sunflower Oil

If you see the common name, well than it is easy to understand that it is a natural plant ingredient, however if you do not, then you are stuck with words that may as well be chemicals for all you know.

How the living specimen naming system works:

Every living thing as soon as it is classified gets a biological name
The name is composed of 2 words
The first word is always capitalized, the second word is never capitalized (if written properly)
If typed the two words should be italicized or underlined, if hand written the two words should be underlined separately
The first word of the name stands for what genus the species belongs to
The second word of the name stands for the actual species name (however to refer to a species properly both words are used)
Sometimes both words are written in full (i.e. Helianthus annuus) and other times the genus name may be represented by a single letter followed by a period and then the species name (i.e. H. annuus)
The words being Latin, usually end in “us”, “es”, “os”, “as”, “is”, etc., however exceptions apply

If I am looking at a product label that says “natural”, I consequently want to see as many of these types of names as possible. Let us therefore put this into practice and work through some examples.

Practical Examples

1. Examine the following ingredient list:

… Aloe Barbadensis Juice, Triethanolamine, Chamomile Flower Extract, Citrus Grandis Oil…

Did you notice that the names all start with a capital letter which makes it harder to detect the true binomial nomenclature of plant names? So this manufacturer did not follow proper biological naming.

The 1^st ingredient (Aloe Barbadensis ) has 2 words in the name and is some kind of a juice, hence you have 3 clues here, first that you recognize aloe as a plant, secondly that the second word ends in “is” and finally “juice” usually refers to something plant based

The 2^nd ingredient (Triethanolamine) is a typical one word chemical name, remember you will either see a plant’s common, one word name or biological 2 word name

The 3^rd ingredient (Chamomile Flower Extract) is a common name for the plant used

The 4^th ingredient (Citrus Grandis) has 2 words in the name and both end in typical Latin endings as well, you also have a clue in the root word ‘citrus’ that it is derived from a plant

2. Examine the following ingredient list:

…CETYL ALCOHOL, THEOBROMA CACAO BUTTER, CARBOMER 940, GLYCERIN, DMDM HYDANTOIN, GREEN TEA EXTRACT, CUCUMIS SATIVUS, TOCOPHEROL ACETATE…

Did you notice that the manufacturer wrote everything using capitals, which makes it harder to detect the biological names of items?

The 1^st ingredient (CETYL ALCOHOL) has 2 words in it, however based on the fact that the word alcohol is included you can dismiss it right away from being a plant based ingredient

The 2^nd ingredient (THEOBROMA CACAO BUTTER) also is made of 2 words and although it does not end in the typical endings I explained above, you have two hints here to indicate it is a natural plant based ingredient: “cacao” and “butter”

The 3^rd ingredient (CARBOMER 940) is made up of 2 parts but the second part is a number, plant based ingredients do not have numbers, chemicals do

The 4^th ingredient (GLYCERIN) is one word and a common chemical most of us are familiar with, but not a plant name (more on this in tutorial 3)

The 5^th ingredient (DMDM HYDANTOIN) has two words, but the first is an acronym, plant names do not go by acronyms

The 6^th ingredient (GREEN TEA EXTRACT) is commonly recognized as plant based

The 7^th ingredient (CUCUMIS SATIVUS) is made of 2 words and both have typical Latin endings, so it is a plant ingredient

The 8^th ingredient (TOCOPHEROL ACETATE) is also made of two words but both words are English sounding and hence not a Latin name for a plant

Conclusion

And here is our conclusion for this tutorial:

Try to pick products with lists that are as completely as possible full of plant ingredient names
Look for lists that list the plant names closer to the start not closer to the end of the list (will explain this in detail in tutorial 2)
Avoid products that have a few plant names mixed in with many chemical names, they are only trying to fool you, by probably claiming on the front label that this product is natural in this or that way
Avoid products who have many plant names mixed in with chemical names, this is just another false sense of security
Be wary of products that have unreasonably long lists of plant names, they may be trying to “pad” their lists with anything and everything in tiny amounts and in the end really giving you no benefit
Finally if in doubt do a quick search of the word(s), it may take you a few minutes on the internet but may save your health in the long run

If you have any questions on this tutorial or have some plant ingredient names to verify let me know. In the meantime remember education is the best approach to prevention and prevention is the best approach to staying healthy! So READ! READ! READ ALL THOSE LABELS BEFORE YOU BUY and don’t make your body the manufacturer’s testing ground.

In the next tutorial we will cover “Recognizing and Understanding list rank and quantities of ingredients”.

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