An ingredient once widely used in citrus-flavored sodas to preserve the drink’s tangy taste may finally be permanently banned in the United States. The FDA recommended deregistering the modified vegetable oil, known as BVO, after recent toxicology studies made it difficult to support the continued use of this oil.

“The proposed action is an example of how the agency monitors new evidence and, where necessary, conducts scientific studies to examine safety issues and takes regulatory action when science does not support the continued safe use of additives in food products,” James says. Jones, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods.

BVO, or brominated vegetable oil, has been used as an emulsifier since the 1930s to ensure that citrus flavors do not float to the surface of fizzy drinks. Adding a dozen bromine atoms to a triglyceride creates a dense oil that floats evenly in water when mixed with less dense oils.

But that’s not BVO’s only trick. Animal studies have clearly shown that this compound can slowly accumulate in our fatty tissues. Health authorities around the world have suspected the emulsifier’s risk for decades, given bromine’s potential to prevent iodine from doing its most important job in the thyroid.

In fact, BVO is already banned in several countries, including India, Japan and European Union countries, and was only banned in the state of California last October, with legislation set to come into force in 2027.

But the FDA is in no rush to convince. In the 1950s, the agency deemed the content generally recognized as safe (GRAS); the official classification included substances that had been appropriately tested or found not to be harmful in terms of ingredients commonly used before 1958.

This changed over the next decade when questions were raised about its possible toxicity, leading the FDA to rescind the GRAS classification for BVO and temporarily limit its use to only relatively small concentrations of no more than 15 parts per million in citrus-flavored beverages.

Collecting data on the risks of these small amounts of BVO over time has not been easy, relying largely on long-term studies that overestimate health effects in human samples. But the evidence was slowly accumulating. Studies conducted in Great Britain in the 1970s showed that bromine accumulated in human tissues, and animal studies showed that high concentrations of BVO were linked to heart and behavioral problems.

This took time and required much more research, but based on recent animal studies on the relative concentrations of BVO likely to be consumed by humans, the FDA was eventually convinced that there was sufficient evidence to ban its use altogether.

Fortunately, most of the major soda companies are leading the way. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola Co. they have been phasing out ingredients in their products over the last decade.

“Over the years, many beverage manufacturers have reformulated their products to replace BVO with an alternative ingredient, and today very few beverages in the U.S. contain BVO,” says Jones.

The ban may be a sign of more to come, as Jones announced that the agency is revising rules that allow for an automatic ban on approving certain food additives of any food coloring found to cause cancer in humans and animals, thus facilitating a more nimble bureaucratic process. .

The final FDA reclassification decision for BVO still needs to go through a lengthy review process and is unlikely to be completed before the beginning of 2024. With viable alternatives to BVO already in use to sharpen citrus drinks to every last drop, this ingredient is unlikely to be overlooked. Source