The chemical, brominated vegetable oil, has been used as a food additive in the soft-drink industry since the early 1930s to keep individual beverage ingredients from separating. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers it safe in extremely small amounts; the controversy comes from the bromine, an ingredient also in brominated flame retardants that has been shown to build up in the body and cause neurological problems.
The European Union and Japan have banned brominated vegetable oil in foods.
"I was drinking an orange Gatorade and I saw BVO, and I'd never heard of it," said Sarah Kavanagh, now a junior at Hattiesburg High School here. "When I Googled it, what I saw was not very good."
Sarah, who has been a vegan since junior high, decided BVO was not something she wanted to drink.
STORY: Coke, Pepsi dropping controversial BVO from all drinks
STORY: Gatorade to remove controversial ingredient
So she started a petition on Change.org in November 2012 asking Pepsi to remove the substance from Gatorade. She got more than 200,000 supporters, and by January 2013, PepsiCo (PEP), which owns the Gatorade brand, announced it would eliminate BVO from the iconic sports drink and replace it with sucrose acetate isobutyrate, a different emulsifier considered generally safe as a food additive. The FDA had taken BVO off of its list of additives generally recognized as safe in 1970.
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A month later, Sarah started her second petition, this time to ask Coca-Cola (KO) to take BVO out of its drinks such as Fresca, Fanta and Powerade, and won her second battle earlier this month when the conglomerate said it is removing the ingredient from a! ll of its drinks to be consistent in the ingredients it uses worldwide. PepsiCo also announced it would work to remove BVO from the remainder of its products including Mountain Dew and Amp energy drinks.
I'm a girl from a small town in Mississippi, and I'm only 17. It shows with the resources we have today, you can really do anything you want.
Sarah Kavanagh, Hattiesburg, Miss.Coke and Pepsi both have couched their decisions to discontinue BVO as one intended to streamline production in the U.S., Europe and Asia, not as a safety precaution. They also have not provided a timeline on when they expect the removal to be complete.
A company or other entity that is the target of a petition on Change.org automatically receives a notice about the campaign. Sarah said she had previously contacted both companies repeatedly, primarily via e-mail.
She said she received a boilerplate acknowledgement from Pepsi but nothing from Coke.
"I'd seen a lot of other Change.org petitions that had had success, so I didn't necessarily expect it to happen," she said. "I hoped they would listen to what we had to say.
"I think the thing that holds a lot of people back is they think that they can't do it," Sarah said. "I'm a girl from a small town in Mississippi, and I'm only 17. It shows with the resources we have today, you can really do anything you want."
Various flavors of Powerade sports drink sit for sale on a refrigerator shelf in a store on May 5, 2014, in New York City. Coca-Cola has announced it will remove brominated vegetable oil from Powerade after a similar move by PepsiCo's Gatorade last year.(Photo: Andrew Burton, Getty Images)
What is BVO?Brominated vegetable oil is a synthetic chemical! that is ! created when vegetable oil is bonded to the element bromine. Health concerns about BVO stem from the bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants.
• Use: Emulsifier in citrus drinks.
• Health risks: Negative effects on brain development, memory loss, rashes, reduction in fertility, disruption of normal thyroid function, possible cause of cancer.
• Found in: Citrus soft drinks including Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fresca and Fanta. It's also in sports drinks like Powerade and Gatorade.
Source: WebMD
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