No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS
I don&#x27;t much care whether it&#x27;s aloe. The real question, I think, is whether the substitute product (maltodextrin) <i>works the way aloe works, to solve the same problem aloe solves</i>. If it does, and it&#x27;s cheaper to stick in a bottle, then I&#x27;m all for it. If it doesn&#x27;t, then it&#x27;s a problem.<p>When you buy &quot;aloe extract&quot; in the cosmetics aisle, you&#x27;re not buying it for its particular organochemical structure (unless you&#x27;re planning to spread it on toast); you&#x27;re buying it for the effect it has. You&#x27;re looking for a chemical that supports aloe&#x27;s API contract for its interaction with your own biophysiology. You&#x27;re looking for, essentially, an &quot;IAloe&quot;.<p>This is the problem with a lot of organic-&gt;synthetic transitions: people know the <i>effect</i> by the name of the organic substance that produces it, and thus, to get any mind-share, you have to market the synthetic by making it appear similar to the organic. Pure synthetic capsaicin is still marketed as &quot;Ghost Chili oil&quot; or similar, because people don&#x27;t know or expect &quot;capsaicin&quot; to be spicy, but they do expect chili peppers to be.<p>Really, it&#x27;s a miracle (of a mega-conglomerate marketing machine) that aspirin isn&#x27;t just called &quot;willow bark extract.&quot;<p>---<p>ETA: okay, apparently people are really very upset by the idea that a company &quot;lying&quot; about a product could be okay.<p>Every company that produces a product that isn&#x27;t under government mandate to be a certain way, lies about <i>everything</i> they can get away with! That is the world we live in. 90% of products on the market are this way. You should not believe a single ingredients list if a product isn&#x27;t in the FDA-regulated classes of &quot;food&quot; or &quot;drugs.&quot; Most products outside of these categories don&#x27;t even bother to <i>have</i> ingredients lists; this should tell you everything you need to know about the incentives that caused the products that <i>do</i> to put one on there anyway.<p>When I say &quot;I&#x27;m okay with this&quot;, I mean that &quot;I can deal with this, because I was <i>already</i> dealing with this in every purchasing decision I make, and this doesn&#x27;t change anything.&quot; Everything on a drug-store shelf other than the actual FDA-regulated &quot;drugs&quot; are unadulterated bullshit that you have to comb through yourself to verify claims.<p>Guess what? That&#x27;s the optimum! Empowering the FDA to fact-check the labelling claims of every single product would cost <i>insane</i> amounts of money, slow the whole economy down to the glacial FDA-approval pace of the pharmaceutical industry.<p>I&#x27;m okay with the world being this way, because all alternative worlds (reachable via anything less than a complete restructuring of government and maybe the human psyche) are worse.