When an Ingredient Name Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

What Alpha-Gal taught us about asking where ingredients actually come from

It started with a word I had seen countless times before.

Glycerin.

After Chappy was diagnosed with Alpha-Gal Syndrome, ingredient labels became part of everyday life around here in a way they had never been before.

Food was the obvious place to start.

Then came supplements.

Medications.

Capsules and coatings.

Lotions and other personal-care products.

We were reading everything.

Some ingredients raised an obvious question. Gelatin, for example, is commonly made from animal collagen, so if we saw it, we knew we needed more information.

But glycerin?

That one caught me off guard.

Because I learned that seeing glycerin on an ingredient list doesn't necessarily tell you where that glycerin came from.

It can be plant-derived. It can have an animal source. It can also be produced synthetically.

The ingredient had a name.

What we didn't necessarily have was its origin.

And once I understood that distinction, I started seeing ingredient labels differently.

In the first Behind the Label story, I shared how a tiny tick eventually changed the way we looked at almost everything after Chappy's Alpha-Gal diagnosis.

In the second, we dug into the research — what Alpha-Gal is, why reactions can be so confusing, and what we learned from sources like the CDC and current medical literature.

But research has a funny way of answering one question and handing you five more.

And one of ours was hiding in plain sight on ingredient labels.

The Name Isn't Always the Source

Glycerin isn't unusual because it's some strange or obscure ingredient.

Quite the opposite.

It's used in foods, medications, cosmetics, and personal-care products. In skin care, glycerin is commonly used as a humectant—an ingredient that attracts and holds moisture.

The surprising part for me wasn't what glycerin does.

It was realizing that two ingredient lists could both say glycerin without telling me whether the glycerin in those products came from the same type of source.

And glycerin isn't the only example.

Stearic acid, another ingredient commonly used in personal-care products, can also come from different sources.

Then there are ingredients where the mammalian connection is more apparent. Lanolin, for example, is derived from sheep's wool. Gelatin is commonly produced from animal collagen, often from cattle or pigs.

Suddenly, reading a label involved more than recognizing the ingredient names.

When the source mattered, some labels answered our questions better than others.

“Can Come From” Isn't the Same as “Did Come From”

This distinction became especially important once we started researching Alpha-Gal online.

Search for ingredients associated with mammalian sources, and you'll find plenty of lists.

Those lists can be useful starting points.

But we quickly learned to watch for words like can, may, and sometimes.

If an ingredient can come from an animal source, that doesn't mean every version of that ingredient does.

Knowing that glycerin can be animal-derived doesn't tell us whether the glycerin in the bottle we're holding actually is.

And that's where things can get frustrating for an ordinary consumer.

You can read the ingredient list exactly as you're supposed to and still not have the answer you're looking for.

Maybe the manufacturer's website provides more information.

Maybe you contact the company.

Maybe a pharmacist can help with a medication.

And sometimes, after all of that, the answer still isn't clear.

We've had to become much better at being comfortable with three words:

We don't know.

At least not yet.

Then I Looked at Our Own Labels

Another part of this took me longer to see.

I wanted to help Chappy.

By this point, it seemed like every time we learned something new about Alpha-Gal, we found something else we needed to question. Food was only the beginning. Then came medications, supplements, gelatin, glycerin, and personal-care products.

It is defeating.

After almost sixty years of simply choosing what we eat, what products we buy, and what we put on our bodies, suddenly having those choices seriously restricted is devastating.

Things that used to require no thought at all now require reading, researching, checking—and sometimes putting something back because we can't get a clear answer.

I don't think I fully understood that loss of freedom until we were living it.

And all I wanted to do was find ways to make some part of this easier for Chappy.

Strangely enough, even though I make body-care products, it didn't immediately occur to me to look closely at what we were making here at Homestead.

Looking back, I think I know part of the reason why.

For months, while we were trying to figure out what was happening with Chappy, we kept hearing the same thing:

Maybe it's the lavender.

Lavender was an easy suspect. We grow it. I work with it. It's in many of the products we make. Long before Alpha-Gal was even on our radar, lavender had already been pointed to as a possible explanation for what he was experiencing.

So I wasn't looking at our products and thinking, Maybe there's something here that could help.

If anything, I'd been taught to look at them with suspicion.

Then I finally started looking.

Not just at the labels, but at the bases and ingredients we actually use to make our products.

And something unexpected happened.

I didn't immediately find what I feared I would.

I started seeing things like vegetable glycerin, plant oils, palm-derived ingredients, and bases our supplier identified as vegan.

None of that proved everything was fine.

It didn't answer every question.

And it certainly didn't mean I was ready to call one of our products “Alpha-Gal Friendly.”

But for the first time, I found myself thinking:

Maybe what we're already using isn't such a bad place to start.

And after so much of this journey had been about discovering one more thing Chappy might have to avoid, that felt different.

It gave me something I could actually investigate.

So I started digging.

The Paperwork Wasn't New. The Question Was.

We already kept documentation from our suppliers.

We already tracked the materials we purchased by lot.

We had already made choices about many of the ingredients and bases we wanted to use long before we'd ever heard the words Alpha-Gal Syndrome.

What changed was the question I brought to all of that information.

I wasn't only asking:

What is this ingredient?

Now I wanted to know:

Where did this particular ingredient come from?

If our supplier identified glycerin as vegetable-derived, I wanted to document that.

If stearic acid was identified as palm-derived, I wanted to know that.

If a base was identified as vegan, that gave me information—but I wanted to understand exactly what that did and didn't tell me.

And when an ingredient could come from more than one source, and the information in front of me didn't provide the answer?

I asked.

The paperwork wasn't new.

The question was.

And that's where this research became very personal.

I wasn't trying to create a trendy new product category.

I was trying to help my husband.

And somewhere in all that digging, I began to wonder whether the products I was already making—and the ingredient choices I'd already made—might give us a better starting point than I'd realized.

That didn't give us all the answers.

But after months of finding restrictions everywhere we looked, a starting point mattered.