A worrying factI did not know….

[CRMACK1948]

I buy a fair number of vitamins and supplements for my husband,many recommended by knowledgeable folk on this site.Many thanks for all your research! However,on researching a British health food company called Health Leads,I read in their” About us” page how and why they got started.One fact they unearthed is big pharmaceutical companies clean and prime their machines with benzine and isopropyl alcohol when making a new batch of pills,which will impregnate the first couple of batches that go through the machine.Capsules are manufactured differently,and this company uses organic soap and rinse to ensure no contamination.

[park_bear]

Benzene is carcinogenic and any benzene found in a product is cause for instant recall. This has included topical products such as sunscreens.

Note spelling. Benzine is something different.

[Bolt_Upright in reply to park_bear]

CRMACK1948 meant Benzene:

"Quality and purity are paramount. That is why we manufacture our own supplements so that we can have complete control. It is actually not possible to achieve 100% purity as an assay test of any product can confirm but why deliberately add questionable excipients when unnecessary? We go further, strictly avoiding solvents in the cleaning of our machines, only using organic soap hence avoiding possible benzene or isopropyl alcohol contamination."

[park_bear in reply to Bolt_Upright]

Yes I know. @LAJ12345 said it better below.

[Bolt_Upright]

Finding benzene everywhere we look

Questions pile up as scientists find the carcinogen in more and more consumer products

cen.acs.org/business/consum...

[LAJ12345]

I doubt they use benzene. It is so toxic. Maybe hexane. Isopropyl alcohol perhaps. If it it then heated or blown out with air or washed with say ethanol it would remove any trace of it pretty easily. Sounds like scaremongering to me.

just because they say they avoid using it doesn’t mean anyone else uses it.

[Bolt_Upright in reply to LAJ12345]

Great point. I had tried, weakly, to find evidence of drug companies using Benzene to clean drug manufacturing equipment and did not find any.

It is all moot for me as I am in America and can't order from Health Leads anyway.

[LAJ12345 in reply to Bolt_Upright]

I worked in a chemistry lab 40 years ago and even then benzene was treated with much respect and only used when critical with gloves and in a fume cupboard as it was well known it was very toxic.

Perhaps there are minute traces in some fuels as part of the natural product and if solvents are transported in a truck that has carried fuel the might be a residue but a faint trace of a residue when diluted again will be minute and given any solvent used in a drug manufacturing process will also be evaporated with heat and vacuum to dry out product there is hardly going to be a measurable quantity left and with modern equipment traces can be measured to extremely low levels.

I know they used to (not sure now) use benzene in the ethanol purifying process for lab solvents as it boils off first with water as an azeotrope leaving purer ethanol. Then the ethanol later boils off at a higher temperature. I found this

“How can a Mixture of Ethanol and Water be Separated by Azeotropic Distillation?Water and ethanol are known to form an azeotropic mixture. This mixture can be separated via the process of azeotropic distillation. In order to achieve this, material separation agents such as benzene, hexane, cyclohexane, pentane, diethyl ether, and acetone are commonly used. Historically, benzene was the most commonly used entrainer for this purpose. However, the discovery of the carcinogenic nature of benzene is believed to have caused a decline in the use of benzene in the azeotropic distillation of mixtures of water and ethanol. In modern practices, the ethanol-water azeotrope is usually broken with the help of toluene. Other suitable options for the dehydration of a mixture of water and ethanol include cyclohexane, isooctane, and even heptane.”

There may be minute traces in other organic solvents used as azeotropes but they boil off at lower temperatures than the ethanol.

Anyway my guess is that aromatic hydrocarbons like benzene and toluene are much more likely to be used in the chemical synthesis of pharmaceuticals. Natural plant extracts will be much more likely be extracted with ethanol and water. Possibly hexane for fatty oily products like fish or flax oils.

plastic bottles potentially could have traces that contaminated liquids in them?

[CRMACK1948]

Thank goodness for independent knowledgeable professionals on this site.It’s too easy for “ what this man in the pub tol d me” to become accepted fact three emails down the line,and just because someone firmly believes something doesn’t automatically make it so! Thankyou for your input.

[Gymsack]

I used Carbon tetrachloride to clean machines on a summer job going to school . I suppose that was not good either.