Brominated Battle: Soda Chemical Has Cloudy Health History

[n2doc]

By Brett Israel and Environmental Health News | December 12, 2011


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 tonights 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.


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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soda-chemical-cloudy-health-history

[eppur_se_muova]

1. I've never understood how an alkyl bromide (potential alkylating agent) was approved as a foodstuff.

It's too close to dibromoethane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,2-Dibromoethane#Health_effects for my taste. I avoid the stuff -- and it's in DG Jamaican Ginger Beer, one of my favorite drinks.