There’s Flame Retardent In Mountain Dew

Okay, because apparently no one bothered to read this properly, I shall pick apart the quoted article (which is to say, I shall do the work instead). There’s an awful lot of insinuation going on, and I suspect a lot of words taken out of context.

“some experts now urge a reassessment”
Yes, okay, that’s understandable.

“After a few extreme soda binges – not too far from what many video gamers regularly consume – a few patients have needed medical attention for skin lesions, memory loss and nerve disorders, all symptoms of overexposure to bromine.”
Sure. I have a case of a man drinking 2-4 litres of cola a day. I don’t know anyone who does this though.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9140329

“In mouse studies, big doses caused reproductive and behavioral problems.”
So what? A lot of things do in big doses.

“”I’ve seen some of these dudes plow through six sodas in six hours,”"
Well, that’s exactly the sort of lifestyle that is likely to kill you anyway, but this 2 litres over 6 hours seems to be a select few people given the wording of the quoted.

“Other studies suggest that BVO could be building up in human tissues, just like other brominated compounds such as flame retardants.”
I’ve looked up BVO, brominated vegetable oil, bromism, brominated oil, bromoderma and a few other variants in Pubmed, Scopus, Uptodate, WebofScience, and haven’t found studies stating the vague statement, at least, not in the first three pages of searches. Surprisingly, such fire retardant is found to some degree in salmon…but that’s just the beauty of vague statements, you can make almost any study agree with you.

‘”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data is scarce,” said Walter Vetter, a food chemist at Germany’s University of Hohenheim and author of a recent, but unpublished, study on BVO in European soda imports.”
Thank you. What else did he say, or was that actually it? It’s dreadfully short on details. He could have been talking about its chemical properties for all we know.

“You don’t have to be a gamer to drink these fruit-flavored sodas. In the United States, 85 percent of kids drink a beverage containing sugar or artificial sweetener at least once per week, according to a study published last month. Sodas are the largest source of calories for teenagers between the ages of 14 to 18, according to a National Cancer Institute study. For adults, soda, energy and sports drinks are the fourth largest source of calories, a federal study found.”
It’s also a fact that almost all children have milk within their house. That doesn’t make it relevant. Those studies had nothing to do with drinks specifically containing BVO.

I even looked up the study in question, and it’s clear that the article twists the study to their own ends; instead of a statement about its health effects, the study is actually about analysis of the drink itself:
“. In this investigation we studied the structures of BVO and suggested a
method which involved extraction of the soft drink samples, conversion of the fatty acids into fatty acid methyl
esters which were analyzed by GC/MS. ”
It goes on to say:
“The effects of BVO were also studied in the past.
It was found that brominated fatty acids were stored in the lipids, but toxic effects could not be observed.”
As well as:
“High
levels of lipid-bound bromine were found particularly in children up to the age of 15, the levels in adults being
very much lower.
5
On the other hand, a person who daily consumed 2-4 L BVO-containing soft drink suffered
from severe bromism and his serum bromide was at 3180 mg/L (39.8 mmol/L). The toxic symptoms were
headache, fatigue, ataxia, and memory loss which progressed over 30 days.
6
Rats fed with particularly high
amounts died within a few days.”

Enough about science and evidence-based statements, let’s go back to the “agency”:

“Research in animals as well as some human studies have found links to impaired neurological development, reduced fertility, early onset of puberty and altered thyroid hormones.”
Once again, rhetoric without any scientific knowledge whatsoever. What dosage was required? What timespan? Are you talking about bromide, or bromide in vegetable oil, and is it ingested, injected or inhaled (yes, there are drugs with bromide in them)? Terrible journalism.

“Around the same time, a study confirmed that bromine was building up in humans. Researchers measured the serum levels of people in the United Kingdom – where BVO was in use – and in their counterparts in the Netherlands and Germany, where BVO was not used.”
Very well, but they didn’t mention that the bromide was bound to fat, which…wait a moment, didn’t it say earlier that no toxic effects could be observed in fat-bound bromide? Whoops.

“”There are some concerns [about BVO] because people are worried that maybe it has the behavior, [and] potential health effects similar to brominated flame retardants,” said Heather Stapleton, an environmental chemist at Duke University who specializes in studying brominated compounds.”
Yep. Now go ahead and make it seem as if he shares this view too.

“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.”
Fair enough. Note that he hasn’t made any statement about being a flame retardant. In fact, all he’s said is that there should be more research.

“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.”
Goodness me. Let’s just say you eat 2 kilograms of food a day. To eat 0.5% bromide, you’d need to eat 10 grams of bromide. That’s….well, that’s quite a lot, isn’t it now?

“The diets in that study had “whopping doses” of BVO, about 100-times higher than today’s allowable limit, said Vorhees, lead author of the 1983 study.
But two case studies in the past 15 years show that whopping doses also can occur in people – with unhealthy consequences.”
Two people. Two people in however millions of people are in America showed bromism. Bromism is very, very, very rare anyway. And that’s two people in FIFTEEN years.

And so forth. I’m not going to pick apart the rest, because I don’t have enough time to do so. Really, though, this article, and, consequently, this Gizmodo re-run, is really sloppy journalism (if it can be called that).