Coke, Pepsi Get Color from Cancer-Causing Chemicals

[roxiejules]

http://news.change.org/stories/coke-pepsi-get-color-from-cancer-causing-chemicals - via Change.org

A study presented at the 2011 International Stroke Conference found that people who consumed diet soda every day were significantly more likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and vascular death than people who never drank diet colas. Just as the media firestorm over those findings was starting to die down, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) revealed even more dark secrets about dark colas. According to the CSPI, soda brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi derive their "caramel colorings" from chemicals known to cause cancer.

As the CSPI recently revealed, foods like dark soft drinks, beer, soy sauce, and especially colas list "caramel coloring" as one of their ingredients. While the word "caramel" makes most folks think of chewy, sweet treats sitting in a relative's candy dish, sodas' "caramel coloring" couldn't be further from those comforting images. Coke and Pepsi's signature hues form when manufacturers mix sugars with sulfites and ammonia (yes, the same stuff that's in Windex) under high pressures and temperatures. The final products are Caramel III or Caramel IV, which contain the chemicals 2-methylimidazole (2-MI) and 4-methylimidazole (4-MI). Obviously ammonia, sulfites, and unprounounceable chemicals might be off-putting to consumers, so Coke, Pepsi, and other beverage behemoths cleverly disguise these ingredients as the far more appetizing "caramel coloring."

As if that witch's brew of chemicals wasn't incentive enough to chuck colas, studies link 2-MI and 4-MI to some pretty nasty health maladies. Government studies found that these chemicals cause lung, liver, and thyroid cancers and leukemia in rodents in lab settings. In California, 4-MI is included on the registered list of "chemicals known to the state to cause cancer." The CSPI says that consumption of "caramel colorings" found in popular brands of soda may be causing thousands of cancers in America alone.

[skepticscott]

1. And gee

that white stuff on your table and in so many foods is full of chlorine, that same stuff that they used to gas people to death in WWI...oooohhhhhh...scary chemical stuff. Evil Morton thought they could cleverly disguise that noxious chemical brew by calling it "salt". And when you can't pronounce the names, that makes them even more toxic, I'm sure.

[NeoGreen]

4. One thing I can't stand is willful ignorance...

Chloride:
The chloride ion is formed when the element chlorine picks up one electron to form an anion (negatively-charged ion) Cl−. The salts of hydrochloric acid HCl contain chloride ions and can also be called chlorides.

Chloride is a chemical the human body needs for metabolism (the process of turning food into energy).<1> It also helps keep the body's acid-base balance. The amount of chloride in the blood is carefully controlled by the kidneys.

Is not chlorine:
the chemical element with atomic number 17 and symbol Cl. It is a halogen, found in the periodic table in group 17. As the chloride ion, which is part of common salt and other compounds, it is abundant in nature and necessary to most forms of life, including humans. In its elemental form (Cl2 or "dichlorine") under standard conditions, chlorine is a powerful oxidant and is used in bleaching and disinfectants, as well as an essential reagent in the chemical industry. As a common disinfectant, chlorine compounds are used in swimming pools to keep them clean and sanitary. In the upper atmosphere, chlorine-containing molecules such as chlorofluorocarbons have been implicated in ozone depletion.

Chlorine is a toxic gas that irritates the respiratory system. Because it is heavier than air, it tends to accumulate at the bottom of poorly ventilated spaces. Chlorine gas is a strong oxidizer, which may react with flammable materials.[

[skepticscott]

5. Uh, thanks dude, I know all that

Apparently you need definitions of irony and sarcasm laid out for you.

If you want to rail against willful ignorance, try aiming at the OP.

[NeoGreen]

8. If I missed the sarcasm in your post, my apologies...

...but I agree with the original post: changing the name of a chemical to make it more 'palatable' is not a good thing. And while it may not be as toxic as you need it to be before you show concern, I find any documented/observed toxicity a concern when I realize that we aren't exposed to toxic substances one at a time in a controlled study.

I am exposed to an almost infinite number of chemical combinations each day, and I have no information on the synergy of the effects of all these compounds created by man and 'dumped' into the environment.

[skepticscott]

9. The point is that the OP is blatantly dishonest

and plays off of people's fears and ignorance of chemistry. It implies that because ammonia (ooooohhhhh..scary) is used in the synthetic process for caramel coloring that drinking a diet cola is not much better than drinking Windex, which is pure bunk. Many materials that are relatively safe are manufactured using far more dangerous and toxic materials (and since you saw fit to pontificate to me about chemistry, I assume you know that perfectly well), but that does not mean that they are made up of or contain those materials when all is said and done.

And your purported fears about "synergy" are nothing more than an excuse to keep up the scare in the absence of any hard evidence for real danger in the doses of things we're actually exposed to. Everything is toxic in too large a dose, so if you're going to avoid any material that has ANY documented potential for toxicity, you'll be living a very strange and short life.

[Igel]

10. Except that they didn't change the name to make it palatable.

It's a mix of chemicals made to resemble caramel. The name's been around for a long time. Back, in fact, to before IUPAC nomenclature was de rigueur and when we referred to things like "phenol red" and "lake blue" out of convenience.

2-methylimidazole doesn't tell most people very much; if you list it with all the other compounds you'd have to worry about variation in the ordering of the names. Most people who are informed would just scan the list and back-trace it and say, "Ah, Caramel II. Why didn't they just *say* that." It's how I feel when I see "phenolsulfonphthalein" written down. Just call it phenol red.

[midnight]

2. I like Pepsi but love Ginger-Ale more- thank goodness.

[jmowreader]

3. Oh god...CSPI again

I am not sure what they want people to eat, but between the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, you're sure to find you shouldn't eat anything you like.

BTW,,,http://www.cspiscam.com/headline_detail.cfm?id=4387 says the average dose they gave to the rats that got cancer was the equivalent of a thousand sodas a day.

[skepticscott]

6. Thank you

as almost always turns out to be the case, the scare about something like this is incredibly overblown. What people don't get is that we are surrounded by poisons, toxins and carcinogens. In the wrong dose, everything is poisonous. Reporters rarely bother to take that into account, since simply scaring people gets a lot more attention than informing them pragmatically.

[Sienna86]

7. Thank you for sharing the information

CSPI is a good organization. I checked out the web site and the Board of Directors. Their mission is clear-cut - they encourage healthy and safe foods.

[Igel]

11. So I decided to do due diligence.

I got doo-doo.

Take the first one (all the further my diligence seemed due, to me). 2-methylimidazole. I dutifully went to the standard database of such things and found that there were 4 experiments listed. They turned up liver and thyroid tumors.

So I looked over the data. For mice there was no evidence of carcinogencitiy below the level of 120 mg, when given that amount per day for 2 years. Now, keep in mind that 2 years in the life of a mouse is a pretty sizeable chunk out of their 3-year lifespan. Also keep in mind that while the weight of the average adult lab mouse is variable, it averages around 20 g, so 120 mg is about 0.6%. That's like me eating 1 lb 2 oz of the 2-methylimidazole a day. That's a lot. And that was the lowest level that they detected any effect from. The CSPI filing says that I'm at the same risk from quantities at the 1/1000th of a gram level. 500 grams, 1/1000th of a gram, all the same to lawyers for whom an "order of magnitude" is a really, really important court order.

Even worse, the database this was in was supposed to show references for all the experiments. After all, you want to know who did the experiment where, what the protocols were, what the details were. Even if the data entry person actually cut and paste the results correctly. Except that these four experiments lacked references.

The CSPI does it's usual fearmongering. In a perfect world it would just explain things. It's part of the world's imperfections. It doesn't. (Let's overlook the melodrama and misdirection, the self-praise and pomposity.) So the ammonia used in producing 4-methyimidazole, if you read the post the CPSI wants us to believe that Caramel IV includes ammonia. They don't say it. It's not so. But they want us to infer that if Coke were honest "ammonia" would be on the list of ingredients. To gain their goal they want us to reach and believe a false conclusion. Just think: Soda is acidic, how likely is there to be ammonium hydroxide lurking?

Then they want us to think "link" (correlation) implies causation. And we wonder why people make the mistake--the CSPI, among others, bases its logic on it and asserts the logic to be true.

And let's not appeal to that bedrock of logical thinking, appeals to authority.

This doesn't mean that the CSPI isn't right. It just means that they're ridiculous and there's no reason to expect them to be any more worthy of respect on this matter than my 7-year-old. In some ways they're deserving of less. They *could* say something useful on the matter, but choose not to. CSPI's primary concern is making sure the CSPI is in the news and preserving the CSPI's power by trying to remake the rules to their own specs through the courts and by manipulating public opinion.

[swilton]

12. There is an emergence of

esophageal cancers in this countries - I'm wondering if this is related? Maybe not enough data yet but ever since my ex-husband's diagnosis early this December, I have had my suspicions.

Think about the trends - diet colas started appearing in the (my guess) late 70's and 80's....esophageal cancers is now starting to come out in the population that mostly consumed those beverages..Another phenomena in the 80's (a product of Nixon's USDA Secretary Butts) was corn products and corn sweeteners....My ex is only in his late 50's - never a smoker but a coke/diet coke addict.....but this is the population where this is starting to appear.

I have no proof or evidence, granted, but I have my suspicions.

[jmowreader]

13. Is your ex a cured-meat eater?

There are quite a few carcinogens in cured meats--the smoke is a carcinogen, the nitrates ALL cured meats contain are carcinogens, and so on and so forth.