Find it: Be a Label Detective

Polyethylene Glycol and its pals are not always easy to find. Since they’re commonly used as inactive ingredients, pharmacists, medical professionals and manufacturers often overlook glycols.

Glycol compounds are in a category of substances that are “GRAS,” or “generally recognized as safe” and therefore they are not considered an allergen. 

Prescription medications and cleaning products are the most challenging because neither are required to list inactive ingredients on the bottle. 

Names are often abbreviated, which makes it difficult to find them in a long list of ingredients. Many manufacturers use proprietary or brand names for products that are essentially glycols.

For example, if two different manufacturers each make 100 mg losartan tablets, both drugs are considered ‘identical’ as long as the amount of active ingredient in each is the same, even though the inactive ingredients are different. Yikes!

To avoid them, you have to learn what they’re called.

Below are some common names for members of the glycol family. It’s not a complete list, and you can find a more comprehensive list here.

Other resources for identifying glycols are here.

It took me awhile to learn what I was looking for, but I can now scan a list of inactives in a product or medication in less than a minute.  

It will get easier with practice, I promise!
Feel free to share your progress in the comments.

Amber