Secret Ingredients

PepsiCo has announced they will be removing a controversial chemical in their popular sports drink Gatorade, but you can still get your daily dose of the flame-retardant brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in Mountain Dew and Amp, which is probably important considering the massive levels of caffeine and sugar could cause you to spontaneously combust. Brings a whole new meaning to internal combustion doesn’t it. 

But PepsiCo isn’t the only beverage company using this stabilizer in its beverages. About 10% of the available sodas have it. Most citrus flavored drinks use BVO to keep the flavor from separating in the drink. Sodas with separating ingredients would have to include instructions to shake well before consuming, and we know how well that would work out.

It’s no secret the FDA isn’t very interested in the health problems related to ingredients in the food supply. Though food is what the “F” stands for, drugs are where the money’s at, just ask any street peddler. Plus, health problems from chemicals in food further fuel pharmaceutical profit potentials, so it’s a nice little circle.

Thanks to Sarah Kavanagh, PepsiCo had to come out about this. They said they were already planning to remove BVO from Gatorade, and have been working with alternative ingredients for over a year. She spoiled their secret mission. Wouldn’t Austin Powers be proud. So now Gatorade is switching to sucrose acetate isobutyrate (SAIB), an organic compound mixed with some chemical compounds and liquefied. Yeah, that sounds safer. It does still carry the GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) label, whereas BVO was lost its GRAS status to an infinite interim of maybe safe maybe not safe status over 40 years ago.

We eat and drink a lot of crap that we have no idea about. Yellow #5 comes from coal tar. Remember Olean, aka Olestra? The chip industry’s answer to fat-free chips was the shit, until people realized how much it made their butts leak. There’s the whole growth hormone in cows milk making women’s boobs bigger argument too. Plus there’s arsenic here and formaldehyde there, so we don’t really know what it is we are eating, or what we are eating was eating before we ate it.

The common denominator is cheap and fast manufacturing to increase production and lower costs. You would think that consuming more fruits and vegetables would be the simple answer, except that pesticides, insecticides, and other  -cides in commercial food production are waterproof, and any remnants are sealed on by the wax coating used to make the food look pretty under the shiny grocery store fluorescent lights. There is always the organic option, if you don’t want to ever be able to afford anything else.

The moral of the story is, maybe Soylent Green wasn’t so far off afterall. We are in the middle of a green smoothie craze, aren’t we.