I was reading through some ingredients today, this time on a can of Sparkling Black Cherry Fresca. I came across one called “brominated vegetable oil”. Concerned after my last experience, I went to Google to find a Wikipedia article about it. Although it is apparently banned in some countries, it doesn’t seem harmful except in their example where a man drank eight liters of Ruby Red Squirt (containing “bvo”) a day and came down with a case of bromoderma which turned his skin red. Given that many servings of Squirt, it seems lucky that’s all he came down with.
Fresca is an amazing witch’s brew of other funky ingredients. Sure there are the regulars: potassium citrate, potassium benzoate, and EDTA, but it also has carob bean gum, glycerol ester of wood rosin, and acacia, though I imagine most soft drinks refer to these only as “natural and artificial flavors”.
I think Dad gets Bromoderma from drinking beer every time we go on vacation.
Brominated vegetable oil has been in the news lately. There were some online efforts to pressure Coke and Pepsi to drop the ingredient from their soft drinks and they have announced they are getting rid of them. Be careful what you ask for though. Coke is replacing brominated vegetable oil with sucrose acetate isobutyrate and glycerol ester of rosin (the latter was already in Fresca).