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Brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, has long been used as a food additive in the soft drink industry, primarily to help keep citrus-flavor oils suspended in beverages and prevent them from floating to the top of the fluid. BVO, which is vegetable oil bonded with atoms of the element bromine, was at one point commonly found in Mountain Dew and other popular citrus-flavored soft drinks such as Squirt, Fresca, Sunkist Peach, and Fanta Orange, and also in sports drinks such as Powerade. In recent years viral online pieces have described BVO as a toxic chemical and urged consumers to avoid products such as Mountain Dew soda that contained it: In a March 2018 Facebook post shared by more than 200,000 users, a woman reported being told by her doctor that the BVO in Mountain Dew causes nerve damage and possibly blindness, and that her headaches and blurred vision could have been caused by drinking large amounts of the beverage: Apart from a follow-up post saying subsequent tests showed that something was causing pressure on her vision, the Facebook user reported nothing further about her condition or medical diagnosis. (We attempted to contact her for comment but received no reply.) The status of BVO differs in various parts of the world: It is allowed as a food additive in Latin American and North American countries (including the U.S. and Canada), but not in Japan or European Union countries. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) originally classified BVO as a generally recognized as safe (GRAS) food additive in 1958, but that classification was withdrawn in the 1970s after studies linked the consumption of brominated oil with heart disease in rats. BVO was subsequently reclassified as an interim food additive (pending the outcome of additional studies), with the use of BVO in food products limited to a concentration of 15 ppm: (Soft drinks that contain BVO now typically contain about half the concentration allowed by law.) Some scientists in recent years have called for a re-examination of BVO's safety as a food additive using newer technologies that were not available when the issue was last assessed by the FDA: A few medical cases involving patients who suffered deleterious effects due to excessive bromine levels in their systems have been attributed to consumption of soft drinks containing BVO: However, those cases involved subjects who drank what would generally be considered an excessive amount of soda on a regular basis (i.e., between two to eight liters daily). So far, no studies have conclusively documented serious health concerns in human beings caused by the consumption of moderate amounts of beverages containing BVO at the concentrations typically used in such products. Whatever health risks may or may not be associated with the consumption of BVO, warnings about its presence in popular sodas such as Mountain Dew became largely outdated. In January 2013 PepsiCo (while acknowledging that they don't find a health and safety risk with BVO) announced that in response to consumer concerns they would discontinue the use of BVO in their Gatorade line of drinks. The company stated at the time they had no plans to remove [BVO] from Mountain Dew and Diet Mountain Dew, but in May 2014 they reversed course, stating that they were working to remove BVO from all their drinks, including Mountain Dew, Fanta and Powerade. Beverage giant Coca-Cola joined ranks with that announcement: PepsiCo did not provide a timeline for the removal of BVO from all soft drinks in their May 2014 announcement. As of Jan.16, 2019, BVO was still a listed ingredient in Mountain Dew on the beverage's PepsiCo web site nutrition page and on the product packaging itself: However, as of June 29, 2020, Mountain Dew's listed ingredients no longer included BVO, as shown below:
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