CAP: Ban hazardous substances in food products

GEORGE TOWN: The Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) wants the government to immediately ban all hazardous addictive substances in food products.

CAP president SM Mohamed Idris also called on the Health Ministry to replace the current outdated health laws to eliminate hazardous food products and make Malaysians healthier.

He said it was inadequate for health laws to emphasise on food labels merely to inform the public on the name, code and level of hazardous addictive substances in soft drinks.

He said it would be meaningless to amend the law just to demand manufacturers to reveal the identity of addictives in soft drinks when health reports confirmed that the substances were hazardous to human health.

“When you know it’s hazardous, just ban it. Labelling does not solve the problem,” he said.

He called on the Health Ministry to immediately assess the presence of brominated vegetable oil (BVO), and other addictives in soft drinks as it has adverse effects on human health.

“BVO usage should be thoroughly banned with immediate effect,” Idris told a press conference in his office here today.

Also present were CAP vice-president Mohideen Abdul Kader and Idris’ special assistant R Uma.

BVO has been banned in India and Japan, and not included in the European Union approve list of addictive products.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has categorised it as “interim food addictive” following reports linking BVO to health effects in America.

FDA defines interim food addictive as one which raises a substantial question on the safety and functionality of the substance.

Idris was referring to recent reports in New York Times on the use of addictive BVO in soft drinks such as Mountain Dew, Gatorade and other citrus-flavoured drinks.

BVO, an addictive added to emulsify soft drinks, is used to keep flavours in beverages from separating.

CAP has listed tremors – an involuntary muscle contraction and relaxation involving movements – fatigue, headache, neurological impairment, fertility reduction and depression in thyroid hormones as possible ill-effects linked to BVO.

In Malaysia, most soft drinks are labelled with “permitted food conditioner, flavouring substances and colouring” without revealing the real identity of addictives.

Last December CAP wrote to the Health Ministry to demand the manufacturers reveal the identity of the addictives in product labels.

In its reply on Jan 17, the ministry’s food safety and quality division admitted that the current health laws were not strong enough to force manufacturers to do so.

The division revealed that it was amending and strengthening the Food Regulations 1985 on this aspect.

But CAP is displeased. It wants a total revamp of health laws, especially in the wake of growing usage of chemically-laced food items.

Source: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2013/01/30/cap-ban-hazardous-substances-in-food-products/

P/S: From Wikipedia,

Brominated vegetable oil (BVO) is vegetable oil that has had atoms of the element bromine bonded to it. Brominated vegetable oil is used to stabilize citrus-flavored soft drinks. Its high density helps the droplets of natural fat-soluble citrus flavors stay suspended in the drink. BVO has been used by the soft drink industry since 1931, generally at a level of about 8 ppm.

Careful control of the type of oil used allows bromination of it to produce BVO with a specific density (1.33 g/mL). As a result, it can be mixed with less-dense flavoring agents such as citrus flavor oil to produce a resulting oil whose density matches that of water or other products. The droplets containing BVO remain suspended in the water rather than separating and floating at the surface.[2] A possible replacement is sucrose acetate isobutyrate (SAIB), which as of January 25, 2013 was slated to replace BVO in Gatorade.[3] Gatorade currently uses the stabilizer Glycerol ester of wood rosin (E445) in Europe.

Regulation and use

North AmericaIn the United States: BVO was designated in 1958 as generally recognized as safe (GRAS), but this was withdrawn by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1970. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations currently imposes restrictions on the use of BVO as a food additive in the United States, limiting the concentration to 15 ppm, limiting the amount of free fatty acids to 2.5 percent, and limiting the iodine value to 16. As of 2012 it was used in Gatorade and Mountain Dew manufactured by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca made by Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

BVO is one of four substances that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has defined as interim food additives; the other three are acrylonitrile copolymers, mannitol, and saccharin.

BVO is currently permitted as a food additive in Canada.

EuropeIn the European Union, BVO is not on the current EU-approved additives list. In the EU, drinks commonly use E445 (Ester Gum) as a substitute.

India: Standards for soft drinks in India have prohibited the use of BVO since 1990.

Japan: The use of BVO as a food additive has been banned in Japan since 2010.

Health effects

The United States Food and Drug Administration considers BVO to be safe for use as a food additive,[6] but there are case reports of excessive consumption that has been associated with adverse health effects. In one case, a man who drank eight liters of Ruby-Red Squirt daily had a reaction that caused his skin color to turn red and produced lesions diagnosed as bromoderma. The excessive quantities together with the fact that the man had a higher than normal sensitivity to bromine made this an unusual case. A similar case reported that a man who consumed two to four liters of a cola containing BVO on a daily basis experienced memory loss, tremors, fatigue, loss of muscle coordination, headache, and ptosis of the right eyelid, as well as elevated serum chloride. In the two months it took to correctly diagnose the problem, the patient also lost the ability to walk. Eventually, bromism was diagnosed and hemodialysis was prescribed which resulted in a reversal of the disorder.

Online petition

An online petition started by Sarah Kavanagh of Hattiesburg Mississippi, at Change.org asking PepsiCo to stop adding BVO to Gatorade and other products had collected over 200,000 signatures by January 2013.The petition points out that since Gatorade is sold in countries where BVO is not approved, there is already an existing formulation without this ingredient. PepsiCo announced on January 25, 2013 that it would no longer use BVO in Gatorade but had no plans to remove it from Mountain Dew.