Image: Flickr/nicoleleec
MARIETTA, Ga.—It's Monday night at the Battle & Brew, a gamer hangout in this Atlanta suburb. The crowd is slumping in chairs, ears entombed in headphones, eyes locked on flat-screen monitors and minds lost in tonight’s game of choice: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim."
To help stay alert all night, each man has an open can of "gamer fuel" inches from his keyboard. "I've seen some of these dudes plow through six sodas in six hours," said Brian Smawley, a regular at the gamer bar.
Gamers say they chug their fuel for the sugar and caffeine, but drinkers of Mountain Dew and some other citrus-flavored drinks are also getting a dose of a synthetic chemical called brominated vegetable oil, or BVO.
Patented by chemical companies as a flame retardant, and banned in food throughout Europe and Japan, BVO has been added to sodas for decades in North America. Now some scientists have a renewed interest in this little-known ingredient, found in 10 percent of sodas in the United States.
After a few extreme soda binges—not too far from what many gamers regularly consume—a few patients have needed medical attention for skin lesions, memory loss and nerve disorders, all symptoms of overexposure to bromine. Other studies suggest that BVO could be building up in human tissues, just like other brominated compounds such as flame retardants. In mouse studies, big doses caused reproductive and behavioral problems.
Reports from an industry group helped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration establish in 1977 what it considers a safe limit for BVO in sodas. But some scientists say that limit is based on data that is thin and several decades old, and they insist that the chemical deserves a fresh look.
"Aside from these reports, the scientific data is scarce," said Walter Vetter, a food chemist at Germany's University of Hohenheim and author of a recent, but unpublished, study on BVO in European soda imports.
The next time you grab a Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fanta Orange, Sunkist Pineapple, Gatorade Thirst Quencher Orange, Powerade Strawberry Lemonade or Fresca Original Citrus, take a look at the drink's ingredients. In Mountain Dew, brominated vegetable oil is listed next-to-last, between disodium EDTA and Yellow 5. These are just a sampling of drinks with BVO listed in their ingredients, which is required by the FDA. The most popular sodas – Coca-Cola and Pepsi – do not contain BVO.
You don't have to be a gamer to drink these fruit-flavored sodas. In the United States, 85 percent of kids drink a beverage containing sugar or artificial sweetener at least once per week, according to a study published last month. Sodas are the largest source of calories for teenagers between the ages of 14 to 18, according to a National Cancer Institute study. For adults, soda, energy and sports drinks are the fourth largest source of calories, a federal study found.
Hold a bottle of Mountain Dew to a light. It's cloudy. Brominated vegetable oil creates the cloudy look by keeping the fruity flavor mixed into the drink. Without an emulsifier such as BVO, the flavoring would float to the surface. The FDA limits the use of BVO to 15 parts per million in fruit-flavored beverages.
Brominated vegetable oil, which is derived from soybean or corn, contains bromine atoms, which weigh down the citrus flavoring so it mixes with sugar water, or in the case of flame retardants, slows down chemical reactions that cause a fire.
See what we're tweeting about
10 Comments
Add CommentI know that it wasn't a comprehensive list of soda's, however, I also know that I get a headache whenever I drink the soda in question. I don't know that there is a connection, but still . . .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe whole-heartedly that this is truly a hidden issue that needs a strong review.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSoda-pop in general is dangerous in only decently large quantities. My aunt had all of her body fat cut out to remove cancer that was directly tied (by her doctors) to drinking 2 2L diet cokes a day.
I personally stopped using styrofoam plates and other plastics in microwaves because of the leaching chemicals as they degrade in use. I even have banned the use of certain types of plastic biodegradeable cups like the ones that 7-Eleven uses. You can TASTE the cup degrading and modifying the flavor of your drink in only minutes! For that test I recommend either Pepsi or Coke as they, for me, have to most effect as noted.
Conscientiously responsible use of all of these chemicals would, in my opinion, entail stating that they ARE PRESENT, AND what the over-consumption of them may cause.
My vote is to further the label system that we have for nutrition facts, and cover the extra chemicals/food colorings used in foods. For plastics and foams that people are exposed to regularly come up with something better. My stray Thought on this, maybe use wax covered styrofoam to prevent leached chemicals? Something more than nothing needs done.
All foods modified by humans is likely garbage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI live in Australia, and reading from the label on my Sunkist bottle the ingredients are:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarbonated water
Sugar
Food acid (330)
Flavour
Preservative (211)
Colour (110)
Packed by Schweppes Australia under licence from Sunkist Growers, Inc.
No mention of the presence of BVO.
The FDA may be OK when approving drugs, but its record with regard to nutrition is abysmal. BVO is just one of the many toxins they permit in prepared foods. They also over-pasteurize foods, including those with no justification at all for pasteurization, to reduce the nutrition of these foods. Big business is their guide, which leads to the reduction of healthfulness and nutrition to that of the levels of factory farms and commercial agriculture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith the high price of milk in New Zealand, it is cheaper to give children these fizzy drinks. Some families do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile BVO may pose a very remote threat - and deserves a current study to determine whether it does - There are other threats, well-documented and orders of magnitude larger, resulting from both excessive soda consumption and excessive gaming, especially excessive war gaming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsumption of excess "empty" calories is a major factor in the current epidemic of obesity, with all its correlated health problems and lowered life expectancy. Excessive gaming, and the lack of physical activity which results, also contributes to obesity and a general lack of physical fitness. The lower consumption of healthful foods (displaced by sugar) can cause vitamin or mineral deficiencies.
Last, excessive war gaming causes a desensitivity to the negative side of mass murder and war. We are training our next generation of enthusiastic cannon fodder. This is good for the military-industrial complex, bad for the rest of the world.
Hey Null, Your sentiment or feelings are good and well intentioned, but the same people in charge of Labeling laws are the same pack of bureaucrats and officials who take your taxes for their salaries and all the other expenses of their office while they accept studies conducted or sponsored by the commercial interests trying to get a certain chemical or compound approved for use.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real fix is two fold. First, people must be educated and educate them selves with out the pseudo science that fills alot of public discourse. Public schools are also a great source of usuless education and non-existence teaching of critical thinking skills. Second, the entire government structure that promises to protect us from our selves but instead simply grows ever more bloated on its own power and our wealth has to be radically reformed.
We, as human beings are responsible for what we eat and drink and do to our selves. Our culture, not our labeling laws, is broken. We eat, drink, and smoke unhealthy garbage, patting our selves on the backs for having an FDA to keep evil chemicals out of our diets. All the Alphabet agencies in this country can not replace common sense. I recommend that you never eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recommend as food.
I am not against accurate labeling of ingredients and do believe that companies who add toxins and other junk should be held responsible, but it will never, never happen in this current political environment and while people are content to let government grow unchecked with out limits. This is to a body politic what cancer is to the human body. Besides, the FDA is too busy raiding farms and business that deal in raw milk products.
The real solution is individual responsibility and the vast power of knowledge.
Happy New Year to you and yours.
Hey Null, Your sentiment or feelings are good and well intentioned, but the same people in charge of Labeling laws are the same pack of bureaucrats and officials who take your taxes for their salaries and all the other expenses of their office while they accept studies conducted or sponsored by the commercial interests trying to get a certain chemical or compound approved for use.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real fix is two fold. First, people must be educated and educate them selves with out the pseudo science that fills alot of public discourse. Public schools are also a great source of usuless education and non-existence teaching of critical thinking skills. Second, the entire government structure that promises to protect us from our selves but instead simply grows ever more bloated on its own power and our wealth has to be radically reformed.
We, as human beings are responsible for what we eat and drink and do to our selves. Our culture, not our labeling laws, is broken. We eat, drink, and smoke unhealthy garbage, patting our selves on the backs for having an FDA to keep evil chemicals out of our diets. All the Alphabet agencies in this country can not replace common sense. I recommend that you never eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recommend as food.
I am not against accurate labeling of ingredients and do believe that companies who add toxins and other junk should be held responsible, but it will never, never happen in this current political environment and while people are content to let government grow unchecked with out limits. This is to a body politic what cancer is to the human body. Besides, the FDA is too busy raiding farms and business that deal in raw milk products.
The real solution is individual responsibility and the vast power of knowledge.
Happy New Year to you and yours.
I see some comments from people outside of the U.S. that BVO is not listed in their Mt Dew. Since most other countries ban this ingredient, I do not see why they cannot do that here in the U.S. ? They have already banned it in Gatorade here, but not the soda(s). I understand how it binds the citrus in these drinks, but seems where it is banned, they found a better and safer way. Don't see why not do that here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this