Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Medicine

FDA Bans BVO, an Additive Found In Some Fruity Sodas (axios.com) 176

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The Food and Drug Administration will no longer allow the use of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food products and sodas due to concerns it poses a threat to people's health, the FDA announced Tuesday. The ban follows similar action in California against the food additive that's modified with bromine, which has been used in small quantities as a stabilizer in some citrus-flavored drinks and which is also found in fire retardants.

Jim Jones, the deputy commissioner for the FDA's Human Foods Program, said in a statement that "removal of the only authorized use of BVO from the food supply was based on a thorough review of current science and research findings that raised safety concerns." The FDA "concluded that the intended use of BVO in food is no longer considered safe after the results of studies conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found the potential for adverse health effects in humans," per an agency statement. A 2022 FDA study found that oral exposure to the additive "is associated with increased tissue levels of bromine and that at high levels of exposure the thyroid is a target organ of potential negative health effects in rodents."
The ban takes effect on August 2. Companies will have one year from then to "reformulate, relabel, and deplete the inventory of BVO-containing products before the FDA begins enforcing the final rule," according to the agency.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

FDA Bans BVO, an Additive Found In Some Fruity Sodas

Comments Filter:
  • by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @10:47PM (#64599713)

    SunDrop still has it, as do a few store brand sodas. Gatorade, Power Ade, and Mountain Dew were once infamous for BVO, but those drinks have all been reformulated to remove the stuff.

    • Probably because it has been banned in the EU for 8 years now. Alternatives had to be researched.

    • SunDrop still has it, as do a few store brand sodas. Gatorade, Power Ade, and Mountain Dew were once infamous for BVO, but those drinks have all been reformulated to remove the stuff.

      Yep. The click bait headlines all try to make it sound like "commonly used in soda!" but it's pretty uncommon, actually.

    • by Dadoo ( 899435 )

      All orange drinks (and sodas) I'm aware of use it.

      Now they just need to get rid of the glycerol ester of wood rosin.

  • the public has to be guinea pigs for the food industry? Let them do whatever they want first? How many times do we do this?
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Until an unacceptable number of stiffs pile up or enough people have been grievously injured. Actuaries for companies can put a price on your grandmother and can figure out the perfect price point at which the company starts to lose money. One just needs to keep accurate figures.

      So what is a person to do? Easy, keep accurate statistics on your family and neighbors. If they start dying in numbers that surprise you, dig into what they ate and resolve not to eat it.

  • by Real_Doc ( 566009 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @10:59PM (#64599725)
    BVO contains Bromine. Bromine is in the same column as iodine in the periodic table. Bromine is roughly the similar size as iodine as well. Bromine will substitute for Iodine in a human body and then cause havoc in the endocrine system. In other words, instead of 3 iodines in a T3 thyroid hormone, there may be 2 iodines and a bromine. This means that the T3 is defective and will not work. As a Medical Doctor, it is very common for me to see hypothyroid patients that are poisoned with Bromine. If you are able to flush the bromine out of the body, their endocrine hypothyroid problem gets better.
    • BVO contains Bromine. Bromine is in the same column as iodine in the periodic table. Bromine is roughly the similar size as iodine as well. Bromine will substitute for Iodine in a human body and then cause havoc in the endocrine system. In other words, instead of 3 iodines in a T3 thyroid hormone, there may be 2 iodines and a bromine. This means that the T3 is defective and will not work. As a Medical Doctor, it is very common for me to see hypothyroid patients that are poisoned with Bromine. If you are able to flush the bromine out of the body, their endocrine hypothyroid problem gets better.

      Yay, more endocrine disruptors! 8^) I went to Wikipedia, and was surprised about "bromism" and how it used to be pretty common, especially since it was once in medicine like Potassium and Lithium bromide. How do people contract it today? From what I gather, the last legal use was in store brand soft drinks.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      BVO contains Bromine. Bromine is in the same column as iodine in the periodic table. Bromine is roughly the similar size as iodine as well. Bromine will substitute for Iodine in a human body and then cause havoc in the endocrine system. In other words, instead of 3 iodines in a T3 thyroid hormone, there may be 2 iodines and a bromine. This means that the T3 is defective and will not work. As a Medical Doctor, it is very common for me to see hypothyroid patients that are poisoned with Bromine. If you are abl

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @11:07PM (#64599739)

    "The ban follows similar action in California against the food additive that's modified with bromine, which has been used in small quantities as a stabilizer in some citrus-flavored drinks and which is also found in fire retardants."

    Don't any of these people think about the consequences of their actions? They've now pretty much guaranteed that these poor people are gonna start randomly bursting into flame. You may think "so what" - but what if one of them is standing right next to you?

    (yes, yes, I've heard about SHC [wikipedia.org])

    • Plastic bottles for orange juice are thicker because the acid in orange juice is more likely to weaken the bottle.

      Is this just that the acid dissolves the plastic faster than water does? And, if so, how much, what chemicals and what are the effects of dissolved/leached plastic chemicals on the human body?

  • Guess the US wants to reduce the amount its population gets poisoned as well. Good.

    • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      As an outsider it seems to me that big corp money talks louder in the US than in the europe, though you'd think even the sociopaths in charge of these corps would refrain from wanting to poison their own food and drink but I guess mammons call overrides almost everything.

    • Guess the US wants to reduce the amount its population gets poisoned as well. Good.

      When they’ve ignored it that long, best to assume that public health isn’t anywhere near the reason it’s finally being banned.

  • By the first lawsuit challenging it. The era of “some government agency bans something new” is over. If it’s not explicitly stated in the law, it won’t stick. The supreme court just saw to that.

    There’s going to be a LOT of things getting unbanned/unregulated/unrestricted in the next few years. It’ll be a libertarian conservatives dream, right up to the point where everyone starts finding pieces of mouse dung in their burgers that are large enough to taste and identify
  • That's an interesting name for the person controlling the additives to fruit-flavored beverages.

    Perhaps he's making up for the previous one.

    • That's an interesting name for the person controlling the additives to fruit-flavored beverages.

      The other guy wasn't keen on congressional oversight at all.

  • Big Soda: Give that man a raise! What could possibly go wrong?
  • This'll get struck down as government overreach. How dare they presume to ban True 'Muricans(TM) from drinking fire retardant!

    And now, because of the supreme court, we can finally get rid of water fluoridation, which saps our precious bodily fluids.

    And they can stop all this nonsense about Ivermectin not being an effective treatment for the 5G COVID hoax. Freedom!
    • Fluoride defenders are now down to the level of trying to argue that there is a lack of evidence that fluoridation has less than 2x safety margin ...

      Yes, it's mainly chuddies who are anti-fluoride, sometimes kneejerking to "anything but agreeing with chuddies" gets really weird though. Just to disagree with chuddies, things like fluoride and lab leak become matter of scientific religion far more than science.

      Most of the scientists defending fluoride know better than to think that the evidence is clear, they

  • by Usefull Idiot ( 202445 ) on Thursday July 04, 2024 @07:19AM (#64600263)

    As long as the science backs it up, that's good, but why - "which is also found in fire retardants." You are aware, a lot of fire retardants contain water, does that make it toxic? I'm not sure that's how things work.

  • You don't know what you got 'til it's gone. The FDA gets to ban something - that'll drift away. Pretty soon they won't be able to ban lethal doses of cyanide in Flintstones vitamins.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 04, 2024 @10:58AM (#64600605)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ....so Jim Jones has strong opinions about the ingredients in a fruit-flavored drink?

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

Working...