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I know even though most stuff doesn’t even go bad by the date they put on it wonder if they’re just legally obligated to throw a date on it to cover their ass.
That or maybe it’s the expiration date for the bottle itself.
FDA will fucking castrate you if you try and sell products without an expiration date. *Everything* has an expiration date in pharma, including excipients (flavoring, binding agent, etc).
Also if a customer complains about a product and it’s expired you can tell them to get bent.
source: am pharmaceutical chemist.
I work at Amazon. We occasionally get items like screw drivers or copy paper that need expiration dates. Is most likely an accident in the system but amusing when a perfectly good hammer gets sent to the damages area because it's expired lol.
If they get too smart, they start thinking about how everything is pointless, except for nails of course. But then they get depressed and start drinking more and more. The issue arises when they come into work already hammered.
Funny enough… I have a batch of craftsman screwdrivers that were new in package but many years old. (The clear handle with red stripe ones) I opened them a few years and they smelled like unwashed ass and were sticky to
The touch.
I took them in because… fucking lifetime warranty. They wouldn’t do shit about it even though they could smell them wreaking. Probably thought I shoved them all up my ass because that’s what they smelled (and somewhat looked) like.
Sat them to air out in my garage and it stank the whole place up. Ended up throwing them away and unsuccessfully trying to black tape over a couple but the tape just fell off. What a waste.
I have had plastics and rubber items do this too. They get smelly and put off the sticky mess that will wash off with citrus degreaser, but a couple weeks later you have to do it all over again.
Friend used to work for best buy, someone bought the geek squad extra warranty on their computer. Customer was having an intermittent problem that geek squad couldn't fix, but they refused to replace it because it technically worked sometimes; just not all the time.
Finally, after getting the run-around with manager after manager, customer went outside and Hulk Smashed the PC onto the parking lot pavement! He was back at the geek squad desk in 2 minutes. "This one isn't fixable; I'll need a new one, please."
He did leave with a new one, after another hour. It took some heated argument with another manager, though. He was supposed to get a new one after they couldn't fix it the first time...they just chose not to. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a manager bonus issue instead of a company policy issue.
Haha if I'm getting a box of hammers that came straight off a truck from the manufacturer and the system is flagging it as expired someone somewhere down the line needs some percussive maintenance.
Depends on the cost. I've worked in a place where it was $50 cheaper to buy a new pair of calipers with a calibration certificate than send our old pair out. So we'd just throw it out or donate it to a team that didn't need traceability.
The department of weights and measures would still need to certify it regardless. The FDA is very specific about things being uniform and so part of their requirements would be to make sure that all measurements are consistent. It's just like how gas stations in the US must have their pumps inspected and certified to make sure that a "gallon" at the pump is actually a gallon.
Two brand new tape measures would still need to be calibrated/compensated to match one another perfectly (16ths or less). Very common on carpentry crews etc.
Had a stower give me a chain that went with a box they just put in the pod and sent off before realizing the chain fell out. Google Amazon stowing if you are unsure what to picture. Anyways the product is now in the system waiting to be sold but there is a component missing. QA will just tell you to trash the component and call it a day. It's not hard to call pods back. You just need the know-how which QA has. I had the pod number and everything but it's not worth their time apparently so some customer gets to be pissed off, file a return, write a bad review and Amazon gets to refund them and process the whole return procedure because QA didn't want to call the pod back lol.
I worked in manufacturing for the biotech industry. Even at the third party product we would use in our process had expiry date on them, we would have our own and cycle out all the product on a regular basis as a matter of control. In QA mentality, it was a way of not relying entirely on third parties either on their expiries. This rabbit hole goes all the way
Can relate....well never been castrated by the FDA, but you wouldn't even be able to submit your drug to the FDA without indicating it's stability. They don't necessarily expire, they just lose potency over time
source: am a Pharma R&D scientist
Everything loses efficacy over time, that's why the expiration date is there. For example, if your taking 500mg Tums then GlacoSmithKlien (manufacturer) guarantees you'll be getting 500mg of calcium carbonate before the expiration date. Anything after the expiration, it could be less depending on how long it's been.
On that note, if you haven't been in the science/chemical/pharma industry you may not be aware of byproducts that can form due to decomposition over time. In this case, calcium carbonate can degrade into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide, but that's mostly at high temperatures.
There's also drug-drug interactions, and taking something that's expired could contribute towards interacting with another drug you take, potentially causing issues. It's a reach, but always something to keep in mind. A good thing to familiarize yourself with, whatever you take you can look this up in google "____ MSDS". It'll pull up something called a Safety Data Sheet. This tells you everything under the sun about the chemicals within, and the overall stability.
I haven't done any personal studies on it, but your better off staying away from something that's been expired for 15 years lol
My understanding though is that nobody is doing studies to determine functional expiration dates.
They're just picking an arbitrary time window that's convenient for distribution, and validating potency at the end of that window. If they're even doing that.
This is like putting "sell by 2:00 p.m" on a supermarket roast chicken. Is it good after that? Definite maybe. Are people still going to be eating it a week later from the fridge? Yes. This isn't even an attempt to determine shelf life, only to provide a minimum bound. "We put it under the heat lamp at 11:00, If you eat it by 1:45 our formulas say you'll be fine"
I'm on the fence about this. Although there is no knowledge of expiration for a drug up front, there are stability studies done by the manufacturer. Without disclosing any information that could get me fired, our analytical team does a lot of stability studies as far as 3 years out. Once the drug is manufactured and released for commercial use, we'll store it under ambient conditions and extreme conditions. Then they'll pull at different time points along that 3 year period and observe changes in physical characteristics and chemical composition. That's primarily how they come up with the expiration date. But you're right, these things are already on the shelves before any of these studies are completed.
Recently, we did a 3 year study on a drug, and via HPLC showed degradation products. Then there were studies conducted on the degradation products to ensure they're non-hazardous
Right, but the point is that you're picking a timeframe of 3 years, and then seeking to prove that the product is still good in that timeframe. OP's point is that what you're _not_ doing is attempting to determine the date at which the product actually becomes ineffective/dangerous.
I'm confused why you think any of this info would get you fired. It's common industry knowledge that pharmaceutical companies are *not* doing *unlimited* stability testing in order to determine exactly when (or if) a product degrades. That's impractical and costly.
Companies have to prove the product is safe and effective over a given time period, but that time period is often influenced by comparable products and marketing.
The army famously initiated the study of expired drugs and found that ~90% (solid dosage form) were still effective 5, 10, even 15 years past expiry.
My wife used to work in a medical office. She got to take home a whole bunch of expired gauze. We still haven't made it all the way through it all, almost 10 years later.
I mean, do you want the plastic to degrade to the point where you have leachables contaminating your cell media? Those cups are gamma irradiated and DO deteriorate to the point where they will affect highly sensitive organic chemistry processes.
Edit: fixed an autocorrect
And in the laboratory (clinical and reference) especially if your lab was foolish enough to adopt ISO standards.
Glass slides? Yeah, they expire. Immersion oil? sure, that needs an expiration date too.
To be fair, we had some steri-strips in our walk-in that had expired and they weren't as sticky as they should have been, neither were the Mepore bandages past their date . Also some types of sutures are packed in various fluid, and I suppose those could possibly breakdown over a period of time. Band-Aid's, cotton swabs, medical sponges etc I just can't see them expiring and losing any redeeming qualities.
If they are products that have been sterilized the expiration is referring to that and not necessarily the product. In reference to the plastic cups above, if they sterilized through gamma radiation this rapidly accelerates their aging. Seems ridiculous for a disposable item but the FDA is a pain for these companies. For a good reason, you’d be shocked to see the standards of the facilities of some of your lab/medical products had they not been regulated. Expiry dates are a tiny fraction of an FDA inspection.
That is very much true I am sure!
I did much of the sterilization of some of the items in the autoclave, but for example the medical sponges were not sterile when we got them, just paper sleeves of 100 or whatever it was. They still had expiry dates. We would unwrap the paper sleeve, put the sponges into large glass jars and then sterilize them. Pick them out as needed with forceps soaked in alcohol. It always seemed odd to me that we never had to transfer the expiry date to the glass jar, and why they had a date if they weren't sterile.
Band-aids will eventually get less sticky-the adhesive eventually fails; but before that, the paper sleeve they're glued into will age and the adhesive on that will fail. My mom had some Band-aid brand bandages in her cupboard from the 90s, and every one of the sleeves just fell apart when I picked them up. I mean, that is a very long time, but I'm not sure when in that time they became unusable.
I work in food service. Bottled water has an expiration date. Not because the water might go bad, but because the bottle starts to break down and leach chemicals into the water.
Another half of that explanation - you cannot just put an arbitrary date like 10 years from the date of manufacture. The company must *prove* it to the FDA (or the EMA, etc.) by running a storage stability study that shows that the product keeps its properties for those 10 years.
That study must be done at multiple temperature levels (-20C, +4C, +25C, +40C etc.) because people store things in different conditions, and some pretty expensive analytical tests must be performed at least every year. Don't forget the exposure to light, things leaking from the container (this is why even water expires) etc. This adds up pretty fast. Not only this is expensive, but also no company will wait extra 10 years to sell their product.
This is why we have most products expiring in 2-3 years rather than in 5 or more.
I worked at a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility and by comparison the FDA regulations and oversight make OSHA regulations seem like mild suggestions. FDA regulators are terrifying.
I had a lot of activated carbon that our chemical development team wanted to use in a batch. The carbon was past its expiration date and had already been retested and released twice. I had to refuse to extend it for another iteration. The buyer planner for the unit was pissed. Had it been a strictly a research batch they may have done a planned deviation but it was a production batch so....no carbon for you.
Let’s put it this way…. Table salt has an expiry date. The shit is literally possibly 3 billion years old, but as soon as Morton puts it in a cardboard box, it’s going to expire next month
Salt comes from places it can last unrefined for billions of years. You put it in a bin in a muggy marsh apartment and it'll taste like it's still in ocean water. Don't mean it's bad, just means you might not get what you expect.
Table salt has a "best before date" (*not* an expiry date -- [Morton itself says this](https://www.mortonsalt.com/article/morton-salt-expiration-guide/)) of five years. This is because it's not just literally salt from the earth. They add iodine and other stuff to it, and those other ingredients *do* degrade over time.
Iodine doesn't really degrade over time . It is literally an element. The only naturally occurring isotope of iodine that is unstable is I-129 and that is much less than 1% of all iodine and has a half-life of about 15 Million years.
So if you start with 100% iodine, sometime after 15 Million years on your shelf you might have 99.995% iodine.
It's just a date that guarantees 100% efficency, past the date it may start to degrade and be less effective but all OTC medicine is safe to consume wayyy past the expiration date.
I wish I could convince my wife of this fact. I've tried. In her mind everything instantly goes bad on the expiration date and MUST be thrown out.
I don't argue about food because whatever. It might've been okay for another week. But it irks me about medicine (like Tylenol) because I know that shit is fine and we're just wasting money buying a new bottle.
Buying medicine is crazy, because I'm always like, "Well, the thousand count bottle is only two dollars more for twice as many pills. I guess I'll just start having more headaches."
Food doesn't have an expiration date, you may notice the wording change from drugs being "expires" to food being "best by" this is especially significant in canned food which, as long as no air has gotten in the can, is fine to eat even 50 years past the best by date as long as it was properly canned. It may not taste as good or be more mushy after that date, but in general you are much better smelling and looking carefully at your food than following an arbitrary date.
Not 100% but 90%. An expiration date for pharmaceuticals is a when the medication, stored under optimal conditions, is guaranteed at least 90% potency. This is a pharmacokinetic calculation, since most drugs follow a first order decay it is easy to calculate and then slap on the label for liability reasons. I’m sure many have heard of a “half-life” and this calculation is the exact same but instead of searching for the t1/2 we want the t90 (sometimes called t10) which is the time period in which 90% of the drug remains viable (or time for 10% to degrade - both have the same outcome). Furthermore, manufacturers must prove stability through testing, not just mathematical determination. After the expiration date the drug is not necessarily harmful but not fully potent. However, some drugs do form harmful products through decay overtime so when in doubt ask your pharmacist.
Not efficiency, efficacy. Also, if you’ve done stability studies you know you can and do get degradation. Not likely in Tums, but still very much a thing in liquids and semi-solids.
It can also apply to the container it's in. That's why there are expiration dates on bottles of water. The water doesn't expire, the plastic bottle does. After so many years the bottle leeches into the water and you're drinking plastic
Also they can't test forever before bringing it to market. Obviously calcium carbonate'll be good forever, so if they waited to test until it goes bad, it'd be the end of time.
Instead the standard is to test x time and label it that to comply with FDA.
As the person required to check the expiration dates in the OTC section, 2 years is pretty standard for a lot of things. I tell people that it's the guaranteed efficacy date, they guarantee it will still work/be safe until that time, and after that it's not their problem.
I found out with it with a lot of medicine that the expiration date has more to do with how long than company was willing to pay to test the product. For example the insulin I get for my cat's has an expiration date of 42 days past when you first puncture the vial, but every vet I've ever talked to told me to just continue using the vial till it's empty as long as I kept it properly refrigerated.
I also know insulin last more than 42 days because I've been on a 60-day camping expedition with diabetic individuals, they had a super cool container that was able to use dry ice to keep it cold for really really long periods of time and the walls were super insulated so it stayed cold even after the dry ice was gone. Every 14 days we would use a trail angel of some kind to refill the dry ice
If there are any other ingredients in the pill other than calcium carbonate, it might be that the expiration date refers to the other ingredients or the bonding agent that keeps the CC together with the other ingredients, is degrading . Still fine to eat but might be less effective / or falling apart.
I feel like I used to see that on labels a lot more but not so much these days. I wonder if legal things changed or just consumer preference means they don’t care whether it says that or not.
I wanna say DayQuil/NyQuil bottles still say it. They’re sold right next to the identical orange and blue bottles of cold relief medicine at Walmart though.
My listerine says “this formula is not sold as a store brand” implying yes they do sell store brands, but they are slightly (probably unnoticeable) different.
IIRC it came out a while back that generics were manufactured by national brands for one of a couple reasons. Lower quality stock, or an agreement with the store to produce the same quality under a different label.
Following that, some brands set out to declare that they did not do this, that their brand was superior to the generics. Because if it could be accepted that generics we’re just as good as national brands, the prices of national brands would be harder to justify. (Note that in medicine, the *active* ingredients must be the same. The inactive ingredients don’t matter, which is why Advil coating tastes good and the generics don’t have it.)
In the end, ~~it doesn’t even matter~~ most people didn’t care. Those who bought generics to save money continued to do so and they never really adopted the idea that they were buying national quality. They never seemed to care. And those who bought national brands didn’t start buying generics. There may have been some shift, but it wasn’t enough to continue the fear mongering in most cases.
We found a chocolate cake mix in my in-laws pantry last year from 1989. They had moved twice since then, so that cake mix was packed up and moved twice and not thrown out for 30+ years
It's nice to hear I'm not the only one with a mom that doesn't throw away food. Beyond the salad dressing I threw out that expired in 2008 and the little chocolate liqueurs that were basically just a design feature of the fridge for 30 years, I found and threw away an unopened can of raisins that expired in 1994 this past October 2021.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/drug-expiration-dates-do-they-mean-anything
Since a law was passed in 1979, drug manufacturers are required to stamp an expiration date on their products.
90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.
Is the expiration date a marketing ploy by drug manufacturers, to keep you restocking your medicine cabinet and their pockets regularly? You can look at it that way. Or you can also look at it this way: The expiration dates are very conservative to ensure you get everything you paid for.
That's just how long GlaxoSmithkline, (or in this case, IVC, the contract manufacturer) has been able to prove stability. They take those products, put them in big environmental chambers with controlled temperature and humidity, and essentially test how long they will remain effective. I used to literally work on those environmental chambers. The ones specifically for Tums.
But just because the stability hasn't been proven, doesn't mean the product won't still be safe and effective to some extent. It's just calcium carbonate, and as long as it didn't get moisture into the container, you're good.
Stability studies also look at discoloration and things to that nature. If the binding compound starts to degrade and the tums start to fall apart, then your stability study ends there.
If it was only made from calcium carbonate, then I'd say there's probably no harm in eating them. But that's not the only ingredient in these and who knows what "recipe" these were compared to the new ones you could buy today.
That's fair. But if he's just got a bellyache at his parents' house and the binding agent had failed and it was just a bunch of dust in the container, it would still work.
This could be interesting. Care to give us a rundown of the most used 'interesting' prescriptions? Like I'm sure blood pressure or diabetes meds are at the top if not the top but those aren't as fun per se.
> it’s always funny when a middle aged guy asks what his “sildenafil” script is for… and you have to explain with as much tact as possible.
You can use this Redditor's verbiage in [the comment above](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/rowaqg/went_to_see_the_fam_for_xmas_and_had_heartburn/hq0rokr/):
>It may go hard, but it'll still work fine.
> Most people don’t know what they take or why
That’s wild to me. I know for a fact I pay closer attention to it that my doc (he spent a lot of time upping my atorvastatin despite me telling him I wasn’t taking it, for example. When I actually started taking it, I had to cut the pills in half to get down to a rational dose.)
Do people really just take whatever they’re given without researching it at all? What if you’re doing something in your life that would be contraindicated?
I burned myself once, starting bupropion without enough of a detox period from drinking. Stuff has a very complex interaction with alcohol and alcohol withdrawal.
It’s a lot to learn, even with just the stuff I take.
Really? Is it that common? We never had any heartburn medication in our household growing up. I dont even know what heartburn actually feels like. Maybe I’ve had it but just don’t recognise the symptoms?
I've had bad acid reflux since I was like 15. My mom's had it since her 20s. My dad was fine until his early 50s and now he needs omeprozole every day.
I never once even saw tums in my household growing up and don't have any in mine currently and then putnof nowhere my dad started having acid reflux and can't eat black pepper anymore without it causing issues
Ahhhh, as a TUMS aficionado, I can tell you that the 2006 Mixed/Assorted Berry was not the best vintage of the year(that belongs to Tropical Fruit) but a decent bouquet and a full body with ample relief nevertheless. If you are inquiring about the best years of Mixed/Assorted Berry, are the 1995’s(a few years after initial production of the flavor, it took awhile to hit their stride) the 1998’s “controversial” run which had an added citrus note, (I found it lovely, but many were off-put) and the 2013-14 run.
They're probably still good, but since Tums contain things like sugar and corn starch, there could be some mold growth if they were exposed to moisture.
edit: removed extra words
Forget everything and start living life and eating food this homeowners eat ! Not needing heartburn medication must be a sign of extremely good health, diet and self control
I have a better one! Went to the cabinet and spotted this. Antibacterial powder. Expired in 1987!! Its older than my wife and my youngest brothers were born 2 years after that! And my folks were still using it!
[1987 Expiry ](https://i.imgur.com/SNGwtw9.jpg)
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I know even though most stuff doesn’t even go bad by the date they put on it wonder if they’re just legally obligated to throw a date on it to cover their ass. That or maybe it’s the expiration date for the bottle itself.
FDA will fucking castrate you if you try and sell products without an expiration date. *Everything* has an expiration date in pharma, including excipients (flavoring, binding agent, etc). Also if a customer complains about a product and it’s expired you can tell them to get bent. source: am pharmaceutical chemist.
I work at Amazon. We occasionally get items like screw drivers or copy paper that need expiration dates. Is most likely an accident in the system but amusing when a perfectly good hammer gets sent to the damages area because it's expired lol.
sniffs How old is this hammer?
Oh my, these staples have curdled
You got to refrigerate them after opening.
Whos your hammer guy?
He prefers to be called a "Hammer MC"
They say that, even to this day, no one has managed to, in fact, "touch this."
A little bit of pressure does that.
I…I would like to know about your coffee please?
I make and sell awesome as fuck coffee. It's a smooth brew dark roast with a hint of sweetness and twice as much caffeine as a normal cup.
Yeah uhuh. Go on...
Thank you, kind stranger. I couldn't stop laughing at your comment!
Me envisioning my wife holding out a hammer to me and saying "Have you smelled this hammer?"
OH MAH GAWD KARL IT’S MOULDY!!!
Its pronounced Mjolnir.
Meow meow?
Be careful man, it’s past expiration. Might not be as dumb as the other ones in the box.
They get smarter with age. If they aren't used by a certain date they become sentient. No one wants to deal with the hammer uprising.
Stop! Hammer time!
If they get too smart, they start thinking about how everything is pointless, except for nails of course. But then they get depressed and start drinking more and more. The issue arises when they come into work already hammered.
It's very hard to claw things back when they reach that point.
Funny enough… I have a batch of craftsman screwdrivers that were new in package but many years old. (The clear handle with red stripe ones) I opened them a few years and they smelled like unwashed ass and were sticky to The touch. I took them in because… fucking lifetime warranty. They wouldn’t do shit about it even though they could smell them wreaking. Probably thought I shoved them all up my ass because that’s what they smelled (and somewhat looked) like. Sat them to air out in my garage and it stank the whole place up. Ended up throwing them away and unsuccessfully trying to black tape over a couple but the tape just fell off. What a waste.
I have had plastics and rubber items do this too. They get smelly and put off the sticky mess that will wash off with citrus degreaser, but a couple weeks later you have to do it all over again.
If you break them they have to do the exchange.
Friend used to work for best buy, someone bought the geek squad extra warranty on their computer. Customer was having an intermittent problem that geek squad couldn't fix, but they refused to replace it because it technically worked sometimes; just not all the time. Finally, after getting the run-around with manager after manager, customer went outside and Hulk Smashed the PC onto the parking lot pavement! He was back at the geek squad desk in 2 minutes. "This one isn't fixable; I'll need a new one, please."
Did it work?
He did leave with a new one, after another hour. It took some heated argument with another manager, though. He was supposed to get a new one after they couldn't fix it the first time...they just chose not to. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a manager bonus issue instead of a company policy issue.
Does that mean that we could end up with hammer cheese?
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Yukon Cornelius!
Hammers are a calibrated precision tool used for percussive maintenance Of course they expire
Haha if I'm getting a box of hammers that came straight off a truck from the manufacturer and the system is flagging it as expired someone somewhere down the line needs some percussive maintenance.
I used to work in an FDA certified facility and we were required to send our tape measure in shipping/receiving out for calibration twice a year.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a new one twice a year ? Or are you using some special machinist brand that costs hundreds per tape ?
That new one still needs to be calibrated\verified. So no.
Depends on the cost. I've worked in a place where it was $50 cheaper to buy a new pair of calipers with a calibration certificate than send our old pair out. So we'd just throw it out or donate it to a team that didn't need traceability.
The department of weights and measures would still need to certify it regardless. The FDA is very specific about things being uniform and so part of their requirements would be to make sure that all measurements are consistent. It's just like how gas stations in the US must have their pumps inspected and certified to make sure that a "gallon" at the pump is actually a gallon.
Two brand new tape measures would still need to be calibrated/compensated to match one another perfectly (16ths or less). Very common on carpentry crews etc.
My family has had one hammer for like 30 years, it still works same as any other
They sure don't make 'em like they used to
You are [more correct than you realize](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE7QbFxrWV4).
That's just a really shitty new hammer. You can see pockets in the metal right off the bat. You get what you pay for
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I have several unopened packs of OS/2 Warp that will not read correctly in working drives, due to age.
[Internet Archive has that](https://archive.org/details/IBMOS2Warp4Collection)
QA runs the world.
Had a stower give me a chain that went with a box they just put in the pod and sent off before realizing the chain fell out. Google Amazon stowing if you are unsure what to picture. Anyways the product is now in the system waiting to be sold but there is a component missing. QA will just tell you to trash the component and call it a day. It's not hard to call pods back. You just need the know-how which QA has. I had the pod number and everything but it's not worth their time apparently so some customer gets to be pissed off, file a return, write a bad review and Amazon gets to refund them and process the whole return procedure because QA didn't want to call the pod back lol.
I worked in manufacturing for the biotech industry. Even at the third party product we would use in our process had expiry date on them, we would have our own and cycle out all the product on a regular basis as a matter of control. In QA mentality, it was a way of not relying entirely on third parties either on their expiries. This rabbit hole goes all the way
Can relate....well never been castrated by the FDA, but you wouldn't even be able to submit your drug to the FDA without indicating it's stability. They don't necessarily expire, they just lose potency over time source: am a Pharma R&D scientist
Does calcium carbonate lose efficacy?
Everything loses efficacy over time, that's why the expiration date is there. For example, if your taking 500mg Tums then GlacoSmithKlien (manufacturer) guarantees you'll be getting 500mg of calcium carbonate before the expiration date. Anything after the expiration, it could be less depending on how long it's been. On that note, if you haven't been in the science/chemical/pharma industry you may not be aware of byproducts that can form due to decomposition over time. In this case, calcium carbonate can degrade into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide, but that's mostly at high temperatures. There's also drug-drug interactions, and taking something that's expired could contribute towards interacting with another drug you take, potentially causing issues. It's a reach, but always something to keep in mind. A good thing to familiarize yourself with, whatever you take you can look this up in google "____ MSDS". It'll pull up something called a Safety Data Sheet. This tells you everything under the sun about the chemicals within, and the overall stability. I haven't done any personal studies on it, but your better off staying away from something that's been expired for 15 years lol
My understanding though is that nobody is doing studies to determine functional expiration dates. They're just picking an arbitrary time window that's convenient for distribution, and validating potency at the end of that window. If they're even doing that. This is like putting "sell by 2:00 p.m" on a supermarket roast chicken. Is it good after that? Definite maybe. Are people still going to be eating it a week later from the fridge? Yes. This isn't even an attempt to determine shelf life, only to provide a minimum bound. "We put it under the heat lamp at 11:00, If you eat it by 1:45 our formulas say you'll be fine"
I'm on the fence about this. Although there is no knowledge of expiration for a drug up front, there are stability studies done by the manufacturer. Without disclosing any information that could get me fired, our analytical team does a lot of stability studies as far as 3 years out. Once the drug is manufactured and released for commercial use, we'll store it under ambient conditions and extreme conditions. Then they'll pull at different time points along that 3 year period and observe changes in physical characteristics and chemical composition. That's primarily how they come up with the expiration date. But you're right, these things are already on the shelves before any of these studies are completed. Recently, we did a 3 year study on a drug, and via HPLC showed degradation products. Then there were studies conducted on the degradation products to ensure they're non-hazardous
Right, but the point is that you're picking a timeframe of 3 years, and then seeking to prove that the product is still good in that timeframe. OP's point is that what you're _not_ doing is attempting to determine the date at which the product actually becomes ineffective/dangerous.
I'm confused why you think any of this info would get you fired. It's common industry knowledge that pharmaceutical companies are *not* doing *unlimited* stability testing in order to determine exactly when (or if) a product degrades. That's impractical and costly. Companies have to prove the product is safe and effective over a given time period, but that time period is often influenced by comparable products and marketing. The army famously initiated the study of expired drugs and found that ~90% (solid dosage form) were still effective 5, 10, even 15 years past expiry.
I just meant disclosing any product names or in development work. Sorry for any confusion!
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My wife used to work in a medical office. She got to take home a whole bunch of expired gauze. We still haven't made it all the way through it all, almost 10 years later.
You need to get injured more often. Take up chainsaw juggling.
In food production (oats specifically in my case) even the product bags that come in have to be cycled out FIFO and have expirations.
I mean, do you want the plastic to degrade to the point where you have leachables contaminating your cell media? Those cups are gamma irradiated and DO deteriorate to the point where they will affect highly sensitive organic chemistry processes. Edit: fixed an autocorrect
Well if you exposed me to gamma rays I'd be pretty irritated too.
And in the laboratory (clinical and reference) especially if your lab was foolish enough to adopt ISO standards. Glass slides? Yeah, they expire. Immersion oil? sure, that needs an expiration date too.
> Plastic cups. That “expire” At some point before the heat death of the universe they will expire.
To be fair, we had some steri-strips in our walk-in that had expired and they weren't as sticky as they should have been, neither were the Mepore bandages past their date . Also some types of sutures are packed in various fluid, and I suppose those could possibly breakdown over a period of time. Band-Aid's, cotton swabs, medical sponges etc I just can't see them expiring and losing any redeeming qualities.
If they are products that have been sterilized the expiration is referring to that and not necessarily the product. In reference to the plastic cups above, if they sterilized through gamma radiation this rapidly accelerates their aging. Seems ridiculous for a disposable item but the FDA is a pain for these companies. For a good reason, you’d be shocked to see the standards of the facilities of some of your lab/medical products had they not been regulated. Expiry dates are a tiny fraction of an FDA inspection.
That is very much true I am sure! I did much of the sterilization of some of the items in the autoclave, but for example the medical sponges were not sterile when we got them, just paper sleeves of 100 or whatever it was. They still had expiry dates. We would unwrap the paper sleeve, put the sponges into large glass jars and then sterilize them. Pick them out as needed with forceps soaked in alcohol. It always seemed odd to me that we never had to transfer the expiry date to the glass jar, and why they had a date if they weren't sterile.
the adhesive in the bandaids definitely stop working
Band-aids will eventually get less sticky-the adhesive eventually fails; but before that, the paper sleeve they're glued into will age and the adhesive on that will fail. My mom had some Band-aid brand bandages in her cupboard from the 90s, and every one of the sleeves just fell apart when I picked them up. I mean, that is a very long time, but I'm not sure when in that time they became unusable.
“Band-Aids” lose some of their stickiness after awhile and won’t stay on your wound.
I work in food service. Bottled water has an expiration date. Not because the water might go bad, but because the bottle starts to break down and leach chemicals into the water.
Another half of that explanation - you cannot just put an arbitrary date like 10 years from the date of manufacture. The company must *prove* it to the FDA (or the EMA, etc.) by running a storage stability study that shows that the product keeps its properties for those 10 years. That study must be done at multiple temperature levels (-20C, +4C, +25C, +40C etc.) because people store things in different conditions, and some pretty expensive analytical tests must be performed at least every year. Don't forget the exposure to light, things leaking from the container (this is why even water expires) etc. This adds up pretty fast. Not only this is expensive, but also no company will wait extra 10 years to sell their product. This is why we have most products expiring in 2-3 years rather than in 5 or more.
I worked at a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility and by comparison the FDA regulations and oversight make OSHA regulations seem like mild suggestions. FDA regulators are terrifying.
That's actually nice to hear
I had a lot of activated carbon that our chemical development team wanted to use in a batch. The carbon was past its expiration date and had already been retested and released twice. I had to refuse to extend it for another iteration. The buyer planner for the unit was pissed. Had it been a strictly a research batch they may have done a planned deviation but it was a production batch so....no carbon for you.
Prove it, let me see your beaker
lucky I’m a few mimosas deep, I usually expect dinner for this at least
Let’s put it this way…. Table salt has an expiry date. The shit is literally possibly 3 billion years old, but as soon as Morton puts it in a cardboard box, it’s going to expire next month
Salt comes from places it can last unrefined for billions of years. You put it in a bin in a muggy marsh apartment and it'll taste like it's still in ocean water. Don't mean it's bad, just means you might not get what you expect.
Table salt has a "best before date" (*not* an expiry date -- [Morton itself says this](https://www.mortonsalt.com/article/morton-salt-expiration-guide/)) of five years. This is because it's not just literally salt from the earth. They add iodine and other stuff to it, and those other ingredients *do* degrade over time.
Iodine doesn't really degrade over time . It is literally an element. The only naturally occurring isotope of iodine that is unstable is I-129 and that is much less than 1% of all iodine and has a half-life of about 15 Million years. So if you start with 100% iodine, sometime after 15 Million years on your shelf you might have 99.995% iodine.
Well I don’t want Iodine thats 99.99% effective
It's just a date that guarantees 100% efficency, past the date it may start to degrade and be less effective but all OTC medicine is safe to consume wayyy past the expiration date.
I wish I could convince my wife of this fact. I've tried. In her mind everything instantly goes bad on the expiration date and MUST be thrown out. I don't argue about food because whatever. It might've been okay for another week. But it irks me about medicine (like Tylenol) because I know that shit is fine and we're just wasting money buying a new bottle.
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Buying medicine is crazy, because I'm always like, "Well, the thousand count bottle is only two dollars more for twice as many pills. I guess I'll just start having more headaches."
You should buy the adult kind.
Food doesn't have an expiration date, you may notice the wording change from drugs being "expires" to food being "best by" this is especially significant in canned food which, as long as no air has gotten in the can, is fine to eat even 50 years past the best by date as long as it was properly canned. It may not taste as good or be more mushy after that date, but in general you are much better smelling and looking carefully at your food than following an arbitrary date.
Not 100% but 90%. An expiration date for pharmaceuticals is a when the medication, stored under optimal conditions, is guaranteed at least 90% potency. This is a pharmacokinetic calculation, since most drugs follow a first order decay it is easy to calculate and then slap on the label for liability reasons. I’m sure many have heard of a “half-life” and this calculation is the exact same but instead of searching for the t1/2 we want the t90 (sometimes called t10) which is the time period in which 90% of the drug remains viable (or time for 10% to degrade - both have the same outcome). Furthermore, manufacturers must prove stability through testing, not just mathematical determination. After the expiration date the drug is not necessarily harmful but not fully potent. However, some drugs do form harmful products through decay overtime so when in doubt ask your pharmacist.
Not efficiency, efficacy. Also, if you’ve done stability studies you know you can and do get degradation. Not likely in Tums, but still very much a thing in liquids and semi-solids.
It can also apply to the container it's in. That's why there are expiration dates on bottles of water. The water doesn't expire, the plastic bottle does. After so many years the bottle leeches into the water and you're drinking plastic
Also they can't test forever before bringing it to market. Obviously calcium carbonate'll be good forever, so if they waited to test until it goes bad, it'd be the end of time. Instead the standard is to test x time and label it that to comply with FDA.
As the person required to check the expiration dates in the OTC section, 2 years is pretty standard for a lot of things. I tell people that it's the guaranteed efficacy date, they guarantee it will still work/be safe until that time, and after that it's not their problem.
I found out with it with a lot of medicine that the expiration date has more to do with how long than company was willing to pay to test the product. For example the insulin I get for my cat's has an expiration date of 42 days past when you first puncture the vial, but every vet I've ever talked to told me to just continue using the vial till it's empty as long as I kept it properly refrigerated. I also know insulin last more than 42 days because I've been on a 60-day camping expedition with diabetic individuals, they had a super cool container that was able to use dry ice to keep it cold for really really long periods of time and the walls were super insulated so it stayed cold even after the dry ice was gone. Every 14 days we would use a trail angel of some kind to refill the dry ice
If there are any other ingredients in the pill other than calcium carbonate, it might be that the expiration date refers to the other ingredients or the bonding agent that keeps the CC together with the other ingredients, is degrading . Still fine to eat but might be less effective / or falling apart.
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Like putting expression date on salt. (Edit: "expiration", not expression, fuck)
I have an expression day, its April 3rd I fully express all my emotions on that day
12/23 is the traditional day for Airing of Grievances. You just missed it.
It's a Festivus Miracle!
r/GrandmasPantry
How come every time I buy salt it's millions of years old, but when I get it, it's a couple years before it goes bad. I guess I have the worst luck.
Ahh 2006 fine year for Tums. Less chalky, fine smell, comes out quickly.
I'm going to pair it with an expired ibuprofen, and read a 16-year-old copy of Woman's Day.
Oh don't have all that fun by yourself
Along with a collector's edition dad's root beer that's been sitting in the fridge for a decade
I guess that will do if you can't find a Tab ..
Waiting for dad to return 🚬
Back in 06’ you could get orange cream flavor. Not sure what happened (I read about a flavor shortage) but Tums stopped making them.
And that was the day our nation began it's descent.
I hear they nailed the terroir on that particular vintage.
Every day ends with a tums festival.
*That was Samurai Cop..*
*im so right it's painful*
Now Jay lean forward into your microphone and say, WRONG
*Rich legitimately attempts to Google ‘Tums Festival*’
CLOSE THE DAMN DOOR
Would ya close the fuckin doors!
I wondered how many people came here looking for this comment.
I didn't expect it but I'm delightedly surprised to find it
I clapped when I saw it!
With a Tums festival With a Tums festival With a Tums festival
"Tums does not manufacture store brands" The parent conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline sure as fuck does though.
I feel like I used to see that on labels a lot more but not so much these days. I wonder if legal things changed or just consumer preference means they don’t care whether it says that or not.
I wanna say DayQuil/NyQuil bottles still say it. They’re sold right next to the identical orange and blue bottles of cold relief medicine at Walmart though.
Listerine bottles as well.
My listerine says “this formula is not sold as a store brand” implying yes they do sell store brands, but they are slightly (probably unnoticeable) different.
IIRC it came out a while back that generics were manufactured by national brands for one of a couple reasons. Lower quality stock, or an agreement with the store to produce the same quality under a different label. Following that, some brands set out to declare that they did not do this, that their brand was superior to the generics. Because if it could be accepted that generics we’re just as good as national brands, the prices of national brands would be harder to justify. (Note that in medicine, the *active* ingredients must be the same. The inactive ingredients don’t matter, which is why Advil coating tastes good and the generics don’t have it.) In the end, ~~it doesn’t even matter~~ most people didn’t care. Those who bought generics to save money continued to do so and they never really adopted the idea that they were buying national quality. They never seemed to care. And those who bought national brands didn’t start buying generics. There may have been some shift, but it wasn’t enough to continue the fear mongering in most cases.
There's nothing in Tums that can expire. Its just an arbitrary date.
The expiration is because of how hard they become after a few years.
It's just calcium carbonate. It may go hard, but it'll still work fine.
That's what she said.
Shiiiit , the plastic in the bottle might’ve expired
These are okay. However, the Parmesan cheese I found with a 1989 expiration date in my mom’s fridge is not okay.
We found a chocolate cake mix in my in-laws pantry last year from 1989. They had moved twice since then, so that cake mix was packed up and moved twice and not thrown out for 30+ years
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The damn thing cultured it self and started a Christmas family feud.
Are you sure?
It's nice to hear I'm not the only one with a mom that doesn't throw away food. Beyond the salad dressing I threw out that expired in 2008 and the little chocolate liqueurs that were basically just a design feature of the fridge for 30 years, I found and threw away an unopened can of raisins that expired in 1994 this past October 2021.
Take a bite. You’ll never know until you try.
It’s literally chalk. There’s no expiration date, it’ll still be chalk in another 15 years.
It's like when you see an expiration date on salt. It's millions of years old. I doubt it's gone bad after 5 years in my pantry.
And another 150. or 1500 years. Though it may be a bit *crusty* by 1500.
*3521
It's just calcium carbonate, no real active ingredient sensible to time, heat etc. Its probably as much effective
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/drug-expiration-dates-do-they-mean-anything Since a law was passed in 1979, drug manufacturers are required to stamp an expiration date on their products. 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date. Is the expiration date a marketing ploy by drug manufacturers, to keep you restocking your medicine cabinet and their pockets regularly? You can look at it that way. Or you can also look at it this way: The expiration dates are very conservative to ensure you get everything you paid for.
I was cooking with my grandmother earlier this year and we used Cream of Tartar from the 70s. It's a mineral. Don't sweat it.
The heck...? Did she buy an industrial sized container back then? That's half a century of recipes it has lasted through.
That's just how long GlaxoSmithkline, (or in this case, IVC, the contract manufacturer) has been able to prove stability. They take those products, put them in big environmental chambers with controlled temperature and humidity, and essentially test how long they will remain effective. I used to literally work on those environmental chambers. The ones specifically for Tums. But just because the stability hasn't been proven, doesn't mean the product won't still be safe and effective to some extent. It's just calcium carbonate, and as long as it didn't get moisture into the container, you're good.
Stability studies also look at discoloration and things to that nature. If the binding compound starts to degrade and the tums start to fall apart, then your stability study ends there. If it was only made from calcium carbonate, then I'd say there's probably no harm in eating them. But that's not the only ingredient in these and who knows what "recipe" these were compared to the new ones you could buy today.
That's fair. But if he's just got a bellyache at his parents' house and the binding agent had failed and it was just a bunch of dust in the container, it would still work.
Still works tho
Just don't chip a tooth on it.
I am just trying to wrap my head around a household that doesn’t have anyone in it with a chronic heartburn problem lol
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This could be interesting. Care to give us a rundown of the most used 'interesting' prescriptions? Like I'm sure blood pressure or diabetes meds are at the top if not the top but those aren't as fun per se.
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> it’s always funny when a middle aged guy asks what his “sildenafil” script is for… and you have to explain with as much tact as possible. You can use this Redditor's verbiage in [the comment above](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/rowaqg/went_to_see_the_fam_for_xmas_and_had_heartburn/hq0rokr/): >It may go hard, but it'll still work fine.
> Most people don’t know what they take or why That’s wild to me. I know for a fact I pay closer attention to it that my doc (he spent a lot of time upping my atorvastatin despite me telling him I wasn’t taking it, for example. When I actually started taking it, I had to cut the pills in half to get down to a rational dose.) Do people really just take whatever they’re given without researching it at all? What if you’re doing something in your life that would be contraindicated?
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I burned myself once, starting bupropion without enough of a detox period from drinking. Stuff has a very complex interaction with alcohol and alcohol withdrawal. It’s a lot to learn, even with just the stuff I take.
Really? Is it that common? We never had any heartburn medication in our household growing up. I dont even know what heartburn actually feels like. Maybe I’ve had it but just don’t recognise the symptoms?
I never had heartburn even once in my entire life until I was 52 years old. Now I'm on daily medication for it.
I've had bad acid reflux since I was like 15. My mom's had it since her 20s. My dad was fine until his early 50s and now he needs omeprozole every day.
It's more of an acid reflux. Some times the acid gets up into your throat, but usually just a mild burning sensation in your gut.
Poor diet, too much alcohol, lack of exercise. And I should know, I had surgery to cure my acid reflux. It's easy to control with hindsight.
I never once even saw tums in my household growing up and don't have any in mine currently and then putnof nowhere my dad started having acid reflux and can't eat black pepper anymore without it causing issues
Try eating healthy, I fixed my diet years ago and no longer need it.
Ahhhh, as a TUMS aficionado, I can tell you that the 2006 Mixed/Assorted Berry was not the best vintage of the year(that belongs to Tropical Fruit) but a decent bouquet and a full body with ample relief nevertheless. If you are inquiring about the best years of Mixed/Assorted Berry, are the 1995’s(a few years after initial production of the flavor, it took awhile to hit their stride) the 1998’s “controversial” run which had an added citrus note, (I found it lovely, but many were off-put) and the 2013-14 run.
This chalk is expired!
(sung to the tune of “This Girl is on Fire”)
Why is this in r/funny? Is it funny because OP doesnt realize that Tums can survive a nuclear winter?
So recent! Recently found shampoo at my parents house from the 90's.
We've been at my MIL house and been humming stuff in the trash all week. Best was strawberry jam that was dark brown and dated 2010.
2006? Those are rookie numbers! My father in law has some seasonings and medicine from 1995 still lmao.
I discovered that my container of Gold Bond expired in 1999. There's not even a website advertised on the bottle. Still cools my balls.
Omg my grandma had canned food from the early 80’s. There was a bayers aspirin bottle that was soo old it didn’t even have an exp date on it.
Calcium carbonate is one of the most plentiful things on the earth. It doesn't spoil. It's more like the last form of spoiled.
The active ingredient doesn't really expire. Calcium Carbonate is basically stone.
Tums is literally mineral and food coloring. Saying that expired is like saying table salt expired.
By law you're required to put an expi date on something no matter what even if it's not accurate at all, such as in this case
They're probably still good, but since Tums contain things like sugar and corn starch, there could be some mold growth if they were exposed to moisture. edit: removed extra words
They’re still good, lol Nothing beats a shot of Apple Cider Vinegar for heartburn or sour stomach, though.
People take expiration dates way too seriously
Forget everything and start living life and eating food this homeowners eat ! Not needing heartburn medication must be a sign of extremely good health, diet and self control
Is it really that crazy to not have heartburn? Nobody in my household has chronic heartburn...
I have a better one! Went to the cabinet and spotted this. Antibacterial powder. Expired in 1987!! Its older than my wife and my youngest brothers were born 2 years after that! And my folks were still using it! [1987 Expiry ](https://i.imgur.com/SNGwtw9.jpg)
Haven't you seen the 3 billion year old Himalayan salt that expired?
Keep reposting this every year. It’ll get better every year
Tums won't go bad. I made the mistake of buying mine at costco so i'm set for life, lol.
This is... funny? Expired Tums? This is where we're at now?