Brominate your drinks, bro!

Today I’ve got another in a long list of things to look out for when you’re out shopping.  This one is an ingredient called bromine and it happens to be one of the additives used in Mountain Dew, among other things.  It also happens to an effective flame retardant, which makes me wonder why they consider it OK to use in food.

Bromine isn’t in Mountain Dew to keep it from spontaneously combusting.  It is, in fact, a common additive in any of the so-called “fruit-flavored” drinks.  Aesthetic sensibilities demand that food look and taste a certain way to appease consumers and brominated vegetable oil is one way of achieving that goal, regardless of how unhealthy it may ultimately be.  It could also explain why these drinks taste nothing at all like fruit.

Some of the known dangers of bromine include skin lesions, memory loss and nerve disorders, though testing has shown that it requires far more than what is legally allowed in food to cause such side effects.  Safety testing done on animals used doses around 200 times higher than the legal limit, in fact.  Exposure in the long-term also suggested that the substance was safe, although bromine is one of those things that builds up in your system, latching on to your heart, liver and fatty tissues.  Scientists are currently looking to update these studies in order to get a clearer picture of the potential harm that bromine may cause.

Already, concerns about the effects of bromine have prompted Japan and many countries across Europe to ban the ingredient.  They seem to believe that it’s probably not the best thing to consume, whether or not current testing says otherwise.  Yet still we continue to use it, along with many other potentially dangerous additives.  One article discusses a little more in-depth the subject of additives and how regulation differs from the U.S. to other, stricter countries.

In the long run, a ton of bromine from a drink such as Mountain Dew is nothing compared to the amount of sugar you’d end up consuming to get that bromine in your system.  Still though, why put it there at all?  Are we really so hung up on the aesthetic of our foods that we’re willing to gamble with our health?  While one little ingredient may not seem too dangerous, the proliferation of thousands of these questionable additives does little to help our overall health.  Hopefully, we can start looking toward imitating the good sense of other countries and try to weed this stuff out of our foods.

Bromine Vial courtesy of Dnn87 via Wikicommons