This article has been amended to reflect an update on the July 2024 FDA decision.
An ingredient once commonly used in citrus-flavored sodas to keep the tangy flavor mixed throughout the drink has finally been banned permanently across the US.
The FDA has now revoked the registration of a modified vegetable oil known as BVO in the wake of recent toxicological studies that make it difficult to support its continued use.
“The proposed action is an example of how the agency monitors emerging evidence and, as necessary, conducts scientific research to investigate safety issues and takes regulatory action when science does not support the continued safe use of food additives,” James Jones . , explained the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, when announcing the proposal.
BVO, or brominated vegetable oil, has been used as an emulsifying agent since the 1930s to ensure that citrus flavoring agents do not float to the top of carbonated beverages. Attaching a dozen bromine atoms to a triglyceride creates a dense oil that floats evenly throughout water when mixed with less dense fats.
However, this is not BVO’s only trick. Animal studies have strongly implied that the compound can slowly build up in our fatty tissue. With bromine’s potential ability to prevent iodine from doing its all-important job inside the thyroid, health authorities around the world have been suspicious of the emulsifier’s dangers for decades.
In fact, BVO is already banned in many countries, including India, Japan and European Union nations, and was outlawed in the state of California in October 2022 with legislation set to take effect in 2027.
Yet the FDA has been slow to convince. In the 1950s, the agency considered the ingredient generally recognized as safe (GRAS); an official classification provided items that had either been properly tested or – for ingredients in common use before 1958 – did not appear to be harmful.
That changed the next decade when questions were raised about its potential toxicity, prompting the FDA to reverse its GRAS classification for BVO and temporarily limit its use to relatively small concentrations of no more than 15 parts per million exclusively in citrus flavored drinks.
Data on the risks posed by even these small amounts of BVO over time have not been easy to collect, relying heavily on long-term studies that reassess health effects in a sizeable sample of people. However, the evidence is slowly mounting.
A UK study in the 1970s found that bromine was accumulating in human tissues, with animal studies linking high concentrations of BVO to heart and behavioral problems.
It took time and a number of further studies, but based on the latest animal studies based on the relative concentrations of BVO that humans can eat, the FDA is finally convinced that there is enough evidence to ban the use of his completely.
Most major soda companies are fortunately ahead of the game. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola Co. have been phasing this ingredient out of their products over the past decade.
“Over the years, many beverage manufacturers reformulated their products to replace BVO with an alternative ingredient, and today, few beverages in the U.S. contain BVO,” Jones said.
The ban could be a sign of more to come, with Jones announcing that the agency is reviewing regulations authorizing the use of certain food additives, with the goal of automatically banning the approval of any food coloring agent found to cause cancer. people or animals. , creating a more streamlined bureaucratic process.
The final call for reclassification of BVO by the FDA went through a lengthy review process that has now ended.
With suitable alternatives to BVO already used to make citrus drinks around the world taste good to the last drop, the ingredient is not likely to be missed.
An earlier version of this article was published in November 2023.