[rhizome]

He's saying that just because they're selling caffeine-free, sugar-free diet Pepsi, that doesn't mean it's not Pepsi. That their cheese might be just canola oil and milk solids, but it's still orange. Just because the "aloe" (maybe call it "alow") they use has been eviscerated of all of its aloe-ness, that doesn't mean it didn't start out as natural aloe, and is that really what's important here?

[logfromblammo]

If you take an aloe plant and remove every quality and chemical that distinguishes it as aloe, it is no longer aloe. Homeopathy has no scientific merit. There is no distinguishable difference between pure, distilled water that has been sourced from clean lake water, or from seawater, or from urine, or from aloe plants. An H2O molecule has no capacity to store even a single bit of memory.

It is theoretically possible to perform organic synthesis with petroleum feedstocks to produce an artificial chemical mixture indistinguishable from natural aloe juice. But that would not be aloe, either. It would be imitation aloe. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about imitation products, provided they are not presented in commerce as the genuine article. It might, after all, be an inferior and imperfect imitation, which would not be acceptable to consumers at the same prices.

The important issue is that people may believe that the bottled product is substantially similar to cutting a leaf from an aloe plant and squeezing out the juice from it. It is whether they are getting what they thought they paid for. If no chemical can be found in the product that can only economically be sourced from an aloe plant, clearly, the consumer has been cheated.

[drzaiusapelord]

If the medicinal action of Aloe is preserved I doubt anyone would feel "cheated."

[rhizome]

Yep.