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Brominated vegetable oil, a synthetic chemical that has been patented in Europe as a flame retardant, will no longer double as an ingredient in Gatorade sports drinks.
Molly Carter, a spokeswoman for Gatorade owner PepsiCo Inc., said the company has been considering the move for more than a year, working on a way to take out the ingredient without affecting the flavor of the drink.


Gatorade will remove a controversial chemical from its ingredients.
A spokesperson for Gatorade’s owner PepsiCo, Molly Carter, mentioned to reporters that Pepsi had been considering removing BVO for about a year, pending their discovery of a new and better replacement ingredient that wouldn’t alter the taste. Molly claims the petition from change.org with over 200,000 signatures had little impact.

Ah yes, you can hear Gatorade consumers concerns: “Yum - this fire retardant sure is tasty. Wonder if I can get some pure BVO if they take it out?” Not to worry, Gatorade gulpers, it will be several months before a new “flavor and color emulsifier” will be replacing the BVO fire retardant: sucrose acetate isobutyrate (SAIB).

Molly Carter asserted there’s no rush or specific date set for getting the reformulated drinks out. The reformulated Gatorade flavors “will start rolling out in the next few months,” Molly said.”We’re not recalling Gatorade. We don’t think our products are unsafe. We don’t think there are health or safety risks,” she claimed.

BVO has been banned as a food and beverage additive in Europe and Japan. But it has been used for decades in U.S. beverages such as Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fanta Orange, Sunkist Pineapple, Powerade Strawberry Lemonade or Fresca Original Citrus.

An observer from a gaming bar in the Atlanta, GA suburb of Marietta reports seeing video gamers stack up and drink a half-dozen or more Mountain Dews and gulp them down for their sugar and caffeine, keeping them stimulated and alert while gaming. They’re also unwittingly getting a strong dose of BVO flame retardant.

Binging on these BVO beverages has resulted in medical treatments for skin lesions, memory loss, or nervous disorders. According to Scientific American magazine, studies have indicated that BVO can accumulate in body tissues.

Mice exposed to bromine compound fire retardants exhibited long-term negative health and fertility events in some studies. But maybe it’s okay for humans. After all, BVO solutions are vegetable based. Unfortunately, the vegetables are soy and corn, which are usually GMO planted or GMO contaminated.

As early as 1977, the FDA approved BVO as a food or beverage additive at 15 parts per million. They based this figure on data from “industry studies.” Wonder which industry that might have been? But since then, BVO has been completely banned from foods and beverages in Japan and Europe. Maybe they know something about those long-term effects from BVO tissue accumulation.

So what’s the point of using BVOs in the first place? The heavy bromine atoms keeps synthetic artificial (tautology intentional) flavors from floating to the top of the beverage. Yum, toxic flavorings remaining constant throughout the beverage.

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