The US Food and Drug Administration has proposed revoking its regulation authorizing the nationwide use of brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, as an additive in food.

The FDA’s decision comes after California banned the ingredient in October by passing the California Food Safety Act, the first state law in the United States to ban brominated vegetable oil. The additive is already banned in Europe and Japan.

“The agency concluded that the intended use of BVO in food is no longer considered safe after the results of studies conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health … found the potential for adverse health effects in humans,” said James Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, in a statement.

  • @[email protected]
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    5011 months ago

    It’s not as straightforward as that. There is chlorine in your food in the form of sodium chloride aka table salt. How something is bonded can change its properties. Not saying there isn’t merit to their claim, just that it’s more complicated.

    • @protist
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      3011 months ago

      Definitely this, you can drink H2O no problem, but H2O2 and you’re going to have a bad time. And yes, probably no need to have brominated vegetable oil in our food at all.

      Some popular drinks that contain BVO include Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Fanta Orange, Fresca, Squirt, Sunkist Pineapple, and some flavors of Powerade.

      Yeah all of these are killing you with sugar, too

      • @cybervseas
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        711 months ago

        Fresca is calorie free, so it’s not killing you with sugar. Probably killing you with other stuff, though…

    • @[email protected]
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      -211 months ago

      Great point, and I encourage everyone to look up the difference between the fluoride in toothpaste and the extremely toxic acid the US puts in our drinking water.

      It’s banned in the EU, Japan, and a bunch of other industrialized countries who have identical rates of tooth decay, but statistically significantly lower rates of ovarian cists and low male testosterone (among other things)

      The elements don’t matter, the molecules most certainly do