stevel610 

The product is: Bourdreaux's Butt Paste Diaper Rash Ointment.
(Posted for reference after the link stops working.)

bbbean 

What does the size of the farm have to do with the source of the lanolin? What are they supposedly doing at these large farms that's different from what your wife's family does?

Mad Honk 

I have been using Kucharik's chamois butter for the last thirty five years with no problems. Similar to A&D ointment for baby's butts and works quite well with natural chamois riding shorts. A quick search should take you to the web site and the store in California. Good folks who have been doing this for many years. Smiles, MH

Amber1988

QM Spots Care anti-friction cream is also good choice.

Their products are made of natural ingredients.

pdlamb

I took enough chemistry classes that I can pronounce the names of most ingredients. I guess the world's a safer place for chemistry majors?

PoorInRichfield

I have some of this from WalMart and it seems to work. It smells kind of funky and is much greasier than the bike-specific creams, but washes out of my shorts just fine and is certainly cheaper than the bike-specific stuff.

50PlusCycling

I use Assos Chamois cream, and have used it for years. It has some unpronounceable names in its ingredients, but so does your average potato. After 30 years of use, I am still alive, and my backside is thankful.

AnthonyG

Meh. It isn't that simple and I totally object to the claim that a natural product is nothing more that the breakdown of a number of different "chemicals".

Lemon juice isn't citric acid and "Citric Acid" is not "Lemon Juice". Commercial "Citric Acid" is usually made by fermenting Molasses or other starches and hasn't been anywhere near a piece of fruit.

himespau 

If its chemical composition is identical, what does it matter where it came from? It's the same thing at the molecular level. If there are impurities, yes, that could be an issue, but, if it's pure, it is what it is. H2O is H2O regardless of whether it came from a cloud or someone exhaled it as a result of their cellular respiration.

AnthonyG

Well you are more qualified than most to actually know, so, Is Citric Acid the same as Lemon juice and is Lemon juice the same as Citric acid?
I say NO but what do I know.

cyccommute 

It is that simple. What is in a natural product that isn’t a chemical of some kind. There is not a single substance on the face of this planet, on the face of any other planet, in space, in the dust that makes up space or in “lemon juice” that isn’t a chemical. There is no special ingredient in materials that makes it more “natural” but not chemical. Everything is a chemical.

As I said above, there are also lots and lots and lots of “natural products” that are deadly.

And, by the way, corn starch has been been “near a piece of fruit”. What do you call an ear of corn? Molasses may not be a fruit but it is plant based.

Who has said that citric acid (no need to capitalize it) is lemon juice (no need to capitalize it)? 2-Hydroxypropane-1,2,3-tricarboxylic acid...to use the scary name... is a major component of lemon juice and wouldn’t be lemon juice without it. Yes, there are other chemicals in lemon juice but, because of chemistry, we know what those are. There is no unknown chemical in lemon juice. And, as I said above, there is nothing else in lemon juice that isn’t a chemical. If you drink lemon juice (or any other juice) for health reasons, how do you know what those health benefits are? It’s because we know what the chemicals in those juices are..

himespau 

To follow up on cyccommute 's explanation, lemon juice isn't exclusively made of citric acid, but the citric acid found in lemon juice is identical to the citric acid that you can make by hydrolyzing and reducing sugars (which, by the way, is a reaction most of our cells do constantly). It's the combination of other chemicals added to the citric acid (along with the citric acid) that make lemon juice "lemon juice" and not "orange juice" or "pure citric acid".

AnthonyG

What I'm objecting to mostly, and I'm not directing this specifically to members of this forum, is the hubris of Man to believe that just because we can isolate a few chemicals and then replicate those few isolated compounds in industrial facilities, that we then are Masters of our own Universe and actually have a clue about what we are doing.

Ascorbic acid does not make Vitamin C or completely replicate the benefits that natural Vitamin C provides us when acting in concert with various other components such as say flavonoids. Others as well.

There is no laws relating to content descriptions on food packaging and other products that requires manufacturers to list say "lemon juice" as a long list of the various chemicals and compounds that make up lemon juice.
If its got lemon juice in it it will say "Lemon Juice". If its got a bunch of chemical names then its got a bunch of chemicals in it.
Now if your OK with that then your OK with it. I'm really objecting to some people who are trying to claim that a bunch of chemicals added to products are "Natural".
It's just muddying the waters.

dennis336

Years ago I tried using a chamois cream (Butt'r) as i was getting saddle sores as I started increasing the length and time of my rides. I didn't care for the process of smearing the cream on me/the chamois. Then, my understanding was that, to be effective, for a very long ride, you need to re-apply more cream after a few hours riding (open to being corrected on this) which was a hassle. While (fingers crossed) I've resolved the saddle sore issue, it wasn't the cream that did it. What did seem to have worked just fine for me was to finally settle on a comfortable saddle (Brooks) and bike fit. I haven't used cream for several years and haven't gotten any saddle sores. YMMV.

pdlamb

Yeah, but if you call it dihydrogen oxide you can drown in it!

cyccommute 

We aren’t just isolating a “few chemicals” . The Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) lists 168 million organic and inorganic chemicals. There isn’t much on this planet that we don’t know the entire chemical composition for. There aren’t any “unknown” materials in mixtures that we don’t know or can’t find out. We can replicate compounds in mixtures and, with enough effort, make something exactly like what nature makes. But money drives everything so we don’t do the “exactly” part. We do the close enough part if we can make money at it and we let nature do it if it’s cheaper.

Your point that we don’t seem to have a clue as to what we are doing might have been valid 200 to 500 years ago. It becomes less valid as we move forward. Yes, there are things that we don’t know but we are very clever monkeys and we will learn the things we don’t know eventually. Then there will be more things to learn. There is always more to learn.

L-Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. Vitamins aren’t mixtures of compounds but discreet compounds...aka chemicals. “Natural” vitamin C is L-ascorbic acid. You might find L-ascorbic acid in various mixtures with other substances but those other substances aren’t part of vitamin C. And, again, we know what those other compounds are or else you wouldn’t be talking about them.

There is no water muddying going on here. I (and others) are simply pointing out that just because you can’t pronounce something doesn’t mean it is bad and just because something is “natural” that it is automatically good.

There is no fruit of the chamois tree that can be plucked and squeezed to make chamois cream. You don’t milk Rupicapra rupicapra to get chamois cream...well not the kind you put on bicycle shorts, anyway. It is a mixture of chemicals obtained from natural and “unnatural” sources that have been made so that it has certain properties.

Danhedonia

Just about everything is different. The wife's family farm requires one family member to have another job, but it does make money. They have about 50-60 sheep. I'm not quite sure how to articulate the difference between feedlot/factory-farmed animals and small-farm animals, but it's vast, and touches almost every minute of every day. A sick sheep at the farm will get veterinary care. Shearing is done regularly. The animals are basically treated in such a way so that they have a decent existence.

Some of them are killed. I will say that it is done in a fairly kind way, but ... it's still killing the animal.

Factory farmed animals are treated in just terrible ways. They are simply numbers. I find some of the practices to the sheep to be disturbing enough that I would prefer not to type them here (tied, hanging upside down ... it's just bad).

Everyone makes decisions about what they support and accept - I find factory farming to be so unpleasant that I make efforts to avoid sending my money in that direction.