You Should Know – Fire Retardant Chemical to be Removed from Sodas

http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/05/news/companies/coca-cola-bvo/index.html?hpt=he_c2

After a 12 year old girl’s petition to the Pepsi Company for them to remove Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO) from her favorite Gatorade drink got over 200,000 signatures, the Pepsi Company removed the chemical from their drinks.  Coca-Cola followed suit after the girl added Powerade to her petition, and by the end of the year, Coca-Cola plans to remove the chemical from all of their drinks by year’s end.

BVO, by the way, contains bromine, which apparently is used as a flame retardant in plastics and other products.  It is also banned for use in food by other countries, as the article states.

What the young lady did in filing that petition was a great deed that has made food just a little bit safer for you and me.  I am sure that she did not expect the petition to make waves as it did.  It shows that consumers actually really do care what is in their food.    It DOES matter to consumers that their food sometimes contains weird ingredients that would usually not be considered for consumption, and are sometimes harmful to the body (i.e. hydrogenated oils, “pink slime”, GMO).

Unfortunately though, we can infer based on the tendency for these kinds of stories to come out that this is not the last of the unwanted chemicals in our food.  There is still plenty on the ingredient lists of our foods that we cannot pronounce…and no telling what some of those ingredients are.  I believe that there is a double-faceted moral to this story:

  1. It is best to eat/drink products that are as natural as possible.  If you avoid the packaged, processed stuff in the aisles, that can take care of most of the weird ingredient problem.
  2. Consumers really do have a voice.  If we want our food to be healthier, sometimes it is just a matter of making it known by how we spend our money, and in this case, by petitioning.

Anyway, just thought you should know.

What do you think about BVO being taken out of drink products?

Shawn McClendon
Shawn McClendon is an author, podcast host, fitness entrepreneur and owner of Back to Basics Health and Wholeness LLC, an organization dedicated to empowering people to take responsibility for their own health.

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