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  • 2017-03-21 (xsd:date)
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  • Do Naked Juices and Smoothies Contain Formaldehyde? (en)
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  • On 14 March 2017, Facebook user Kelly Kluchins Underwood published a post titled Friends don’t let friends drink formaldehyde which (at publication time) had been shared over 150,000 times. Referencing a legal settlement over a lawsuit alleging that PepsiCo’s Naked brand of fruit juices and smoothies contained misleading labels, her post went on to make the unfounded claim that these products contain formaldehyde: Based on the $9 million sum cited above, Underwood was likely referring to a class action lawsuit settled in July 2013, although multiple similar lawsuits have been filed, including another one that was settled out of court on 21 February 2017. The former complaint did not mention formaldehyde at all and was not about Naked products supposedly containing dangerous or harmful ingredients; it addressed Naked's use of allegedly deceptive product labeling terms, as described in the case's settlement documents: The parties settled the case, with PepsiCo agreeing to a $9 million aggregate payout to consumers who had purchased Naked Juice products during a specified time period: A similar lawsuit was settled in February 2017. But again, that lawsuit was a dispute about the use of terms such as no sugar added and only the best ingredients on the labels of Naked brand products, not about Naked products' supposedly containing dangerous or harmful ingredients: Neither lawsuit involved complaints about the use of formaldehyde in Naked products. This claim appears to be based on chemophobic language found on alternative health web sites regarding the chemical calcium pantothenate, as the language used in Underwood’s Facebook post is similar to this highly-shared post from livingmaxwell.com (emphasis theirs): Calcium pantothenate is a synthetic calcium salt form of the naturally occurring and vitally important vitamin B5, according the National Cancer Institute’s online thesaurus: Nevertheless, it is true that calcium pantothenate's chemical synthesis does include formaldehyde, as described in the Encyclopedia of Bioprocess Technologies: This is a good place to point out that anytime the words derived from are used in relation to a scary-sounding chemical, it is almost certainly pseudoscientific fear-mongering hogwash. The fact that a chemical is used to synthesize another chemical does not mean that the new chemical carries the same risks as the old chemical. This is because — follow us here — the final product is not the same as the original chemical anymore. Formaldehyde, with the chemical structure CH2O, is a fundamental (albeit highly toxic) chemical building block. Theoretically, one could derive water from formaldehyde, but that water, H2O, would be no different than non-formaldehyde derived water. Formaldehyde is toxic, but calcium pantothenate is distinctly not formaldehyde and is not toxic. There were, certainly, some misleading elements to the Naked product line's labels that prompted lawsuits. But those misrepresentations pale in comparison to the demonstrably false claim that Naked brand juices and smoothies contain formaldehyde. (en)
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