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Why is Flame-Retardant in Your Soda?

  • Spence Cooper
  • July 19, 2012

The always informative Jane Lear, former senior editor at Gourmet and author of several cookbooks, (who recently had some interesting things to say about coconut oil), was asked why brominated vegetable oil can be found in some citrus drinks like Orange Crush and Mountain Dew.

Jane disclosed that brominated vegetable oil — called BVO for short — is vegetable oil derived from soybean or corn that is bonded with the element bromine.

Oh, and BVO is also a patented flame retardant chemical.

BVO is banned in food throughout Europe and Japan, yet BVO has been added to sodas for decades in North America. According to Environmental Health News, some scientists have a renewed interest in BVO which is found in 10 percent of sodas in the United States.

Why? Because the FDA limit for brominated oil in sodas is based on outdated data from the 1970s, so scientists say the chemical deserves a fresh look. Their concern is that it accumulates in tissues, and may have the same effects as brominated flame retardants.

Based on data from the early studies, the FDA removed brominated vegetable oil from its Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list for flavor additives in 1970, but BVO was reinstated after studies from an industry group from 1971 to 1974 supposedly demonstrated a level of safety.

Then in 1977, the FDA approved the interim use of BVO in fruit-flavored beverages.

“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data is scarce,” said Walter Vetter, a food chemist at Germany’s University of Hohenheim and author of a recent, but unpublished, study on BVO in European soda imports.

“I am no toxicologist, but I think that the toxic evaluation of chemicals has been improved since then,” Vetter added.

Some drinks with BVO listed in their ingredients are Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fanta Orange, Sunkist Pineapple, Gatorade Thirst Quencher Orange, Powerade Strawberry Lemonade and Fresca Original Citrus. In Mountain Dew, brominated vegetable oil is listed next-to-last, between disodium EDTA and Yellow 5.

Environmental Health News writer Brett Israel suggests toxicity testing has changed dramatically in the past few decades, and adds that multiple generations of animals now can be tested for neurodevelopmental, hormonal and reproductive changes that weren’t imagined in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Research has shown that brominated flame retardants are building up in people’s bodies globally, including in breast milk.

Heather Stapleton, an environmental chemist at Duke University who specializes in studying brominated compounds said the concern is that BVO has the behavior, and potential health effects similar to brominated flame retardants.

“Compounds like these that are in widespread use probably should be reexamined periodically with newer technologies to ensure that there aren’t effects that would have been missed by prior methods,” said Charles Vorhees, a toxicologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who studied BVO’s neurological effects in the early 1980s.

“I think BVO is the kind of compound that probably warrants some reexamination,” said Vorhees.

Case Studies

Why is Flame-Retardant in Your Soda?Condensed from Environmental Health News:

Data in rats show that BVO could be toxic. A 1971 study by Canadian researchers found that rats fed a diet containing 0.5 percent brominated oils grew heavy hearts and developed lesions in their heart muscle.

In a later study, in 1983, rats fed the same oils had behavioral problems, and those fed 1 percent BVO had trouble conceiving. At 2 percent, they were unable to reproduce.

In 1997, emergency room doctors at University of California, Davis reported a patient with severe bromine intoxication from drinking two to four liters of orange soda every day. He developed headaches, fatigue, ataxia (loss of muscle coordination) and memory loss.

In a 2003 case reported in Ohio, a 63-year-old man developed ulcers on his swollen hands after drinking eight liters of Red Rudy Squirt every day for several months. The man was diagnosed with bromoderma, a rare skin hypersensitivity to bromine exposure. The patient quit drinking the brominated soft drink and months later recovered.

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