The temperature is 92 °F. You’re sitting by the pool with your feet dangling over the edge. It’s mid-summer and the scent of honeysuckles perfumes the warm air. You reach into the cooler for something to drink and haul out a glass bottle of orange, fizzy liquid. You aren’t ten anymore but you’ve never lost the love of a cold bottle of pop to cut the summertime heat. Twisting off the top, you knock back a crisp 20 ounces of citrusy fizz, straight out of your childhood. The flavor is the same, the color, too. The brominated vegetable oil (BVO) holding it all together. Wait, what? Why is BVO in your drink? Oil in soda sounds gross and unlikely but there it is on the ingredients list. What’s that about?

Turns out, BVO is in a lot of citrusy drinks and it is, in fact, what keeps them together. It’s an emulsifier and helps prevent the oils in these drinks from separating from the carbonated water. Without it, a drink like Crush would divide into its parts and make up a very different overall experience. Ok, so BVO keeps orange soda and other artificial orange drinks, like the Orange Thirst Quencher Gatorade, looking good and delivering a unified, homogenous flavor profile. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that BVO has been linked to memory loss, skin conditions (like swelling and boils), brain development issues, hormonal dysfunction, fertility complications, thyroid impairment and, you guessed it, cancer. This makes it an obvious addition to any country’s ban list and it is banned in over 100 countries. Not to make this a trend when combined with our last article, but once again, the U.S. is sadly behind. PepsiCo has stated that it plans to remove the ingredient from its products and has removed it from Gatorade as recently as last year. They’ve declined to comment on their motivation for doing so but we can only hope that this move will encourage movement towards a BVO-free USA.

For the time being, the FDA is holding to its opinion that BVO is “generally considered safe” for human consumption. There are a number of medical professionals that are pushing for a reconsideration of BVO and the global opinion definitely seems to support this perspective. In the meantime, it’s important to know what these chemicals are and what impact they may have on one’s health. BVO seems to be pretty bad for us. Even if you don’t have a large amount of it at one time, it is now thought to linger in the body, similar to heavy metals, building up over time. The global recommendation is to eliminate it entirely from one’s diet. Until the U.S. catches up with that standard, we can do what we need to, to protect ourselves and our families.