FDA Proposes to Ban Food Additive, brominated vegetable oil | Hacker News Reader

FDA Proposes to Ban Food Additive, brominated vegetable oil

fda.gov

50 pointsJimmc41419 comments

Recently discussed when ars hinted it was coming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38146696

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Soda additive linked to thyroid toxicity may finally get banned by FDA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38146696 - Nov 2023 (102 comments)

2014: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/06/310096596/no...

2020: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/05/28/fac...

that one is fun, "reality is more nuanced", BVO has been patented as a flame retardant as well as an edible emulsifier, but that doesn't mean that the social media posts talking about it weren't still disinformation! "Oh kettle, thou art black."

And it was in the Mountain Dew for years after they said they were gonna remove it but now its gone. pinky swear. wasn't that also during the "nutrition labels don't have to be absolutely accurate" era of the pandemic?

It seems like the policy is to wait until is absolutely certain that it is really dangerous before banning it. Can you imagine the consequences of banning something that is perhaps not really dangerous? It's a good thing that these fact checkers are adding nuance!

I have some bad news to tell you about water which is a flame retardant

That dastardly Dihydrogen monoxide strikes again!

Yep, PepsiCo announced they would remove BVO many years ago, after a public campaign to have it removed, and then simply didn't. Their behavior in this case is emblematic of US food giants' disdain for the general public. Who cares if people lose thyroid function as long as we can keep brightly colored dyes suspended in our best selling corn juice?

The most ridiculous bit; it's banned in Europe. In some countries in Europe it has been banned since 1970. Somehow, they manage to make their soft drinks in a Europe-saleable format, nonetheless. So it's not like it's impossible or anything.

So it's not like it's impossible or anything.

It's probably slightly more expensive.

I tastes differently. Quite nice, drinking flame retardant in addition to the diabetes sugar spike has a certain nihilistic appeal to it.

I intend to dig into this some more as I'm curious exactly how the European versions of normally BVO-featuring sodas are formulated. I believe many varieties of mountain dew are simply not available in Europe at all.

My recollection is in Europe (or at least Spain circa 2016) Mountain Dew was much less intensely colored than in the US, and the neon tint was mainly from the bottle.

BVO was one of the weirder ingredients in Mountain Dew for many many years, until it was finally reformulated around ~2020.

Then they released Mountain Dew Throwback, which was subsequently rebranded Mountain Dew Real Sugar, and that variant still contained BVO. It sounds like they might retire it this year, perhaps because of the proposed ban on BVO?

I'm failing to find any study linking BVO to thyroid impairment in humans - obviously we're not going to dose people, but even a low-quality food journal correlation would be nice. So far all I can find is animals and BeWo. I'm nonetheless OK with seeing it discouraged (banning feels weird next to the ATF), I was just hoping for better data.

If you can find some and share, thanks in advance!

We know that bioaccumulation of bromine is a potentially serious problem [1]. Among other nasty effects, it can displace iodine in the thyroid, skin, and mammary glands.

With improved techniques for measuring the content of BVO in beverage products currently on the market, as well as techniques for detecting it in fat deposits in rats, we now have pretty good evidence that it bioaccumulates more than we thought [2].

This is better than a weak correlational study imo. In any case, it's good enough for me, personally. I expect there will be follow-up studies to detect levels in humans who have regularly consumed the beverages in question, but waiting until then to pull this additive would be fairly unethical.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC501258/

[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/brominated...

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