Food marketers have long had a special knack for euphemism. (If you didn't believe me I'd offer you a Rocky Mountain oyster.) But even as someone who has watched the food industry closely for 40 years, sometimes even I can get taken by surprise.
One such case is an innocent-sounding ingredient that appears on Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other soft drinks: "caramel coloring." Now, I've long urged Americans to drink less soda. It's a nutritionally worthless beverage that provides nothing of benefit to the diet, but whose sugars promote weight gain, obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. Another typical soda ingredient, phosphoric acid, rots teeth. Caffeine is a mildly addictive stimulant drug.
One ingredient in a can of Coke or Pepsi I've never been concerned about is "caramel coloring." After all, wouldn't that just mean the drink was colored with the kind of caramel you could make at home, by melting and browning sugar in a pan?
The truth is more complicated. It turns out that federal regulations describe four types of caramel coloring. And at least three of them are quite different from the confection with the similar name. All of them do start out with some form of sugar. One is called plain caramel. A second involves reacting the sugar with sulfites. A third is made be reacting sugars with ammonium compounds. And in the fourth variety of caramel coloring--the kind used in Coke and Pepsi--sugars are reacted with both ammonium and sulfite compounds. Both the regulations and some manufacturers' Web sites call this form of caramel coloring Caramel IV, or less appetizingly, ammonia-sulfite process caramel.
Reacting sugars with ammonia results in the formation of numerous chemical byproducts. Two of them, 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, have been shown in government studies to promote lung, liver, and thyroid tumors in laboratory rats and mice.
California public health officials recently placed 4-methylimidazole on the state's list of known carcinogens. Scientists at the University of California at Davis recently found significant levels of 4 methylimidazole in colas that far exceeds what the state considers to be safe. This sets the stage for warning labels on diet and regular Coke and Pepsi and many other soft drinks unless the companies shift to safer colorings. Going one step further, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is today asking the Food and Drug Administration to bar the use of ammonia- and ammonia-sulfite process caramel colorings.
Considering that the purpose of this contaminated caramel coloring is purely cosmetic, we hope the FDA quickly acts to protect Americans from an unnecessary cancer risk.
Because 2- and 4-methylimidazole do not appear to be highly potent carcinogens, the 10 teaspoons of obesity-promoting high-fructose corn syrup in a can of cola should still be considered a much greater health risk. But if you were waiting for one more reason to give up your cola habit, you now certainly have one.
Linda Larrowe Bergersen: Fructose: What Is It?
I do not need the Center for Science in the Public Interest telling me what to eat or what not to eat.
At best, one could say that it is biologically plausible that these substance could potentially, maybe, possibly be associated with cancer in humans. To reach that conclusion, these compounds would need to be looked at in humans (heavy consumers vs non consumers, with other factors being controlled in both group.....smoking, alcohol, etc). Instead it is just easier and less expensive to put it in a registry.....but not scientific.
If one looks back at the cyclomate controversy when artificial sweetners were first being introduced, these compounds were taken off of the market due to an extraordinary incidence of tumors in lab animals. The only problem with the science, was that in order to consume the equivalent dose that the mouse received, a human would have to consume a BARREL of the compound.
There are many good reasons to be moderate or avoid soda ingestion completely.....but at the moment, this isn't the best one.
Mice and humans share almost identical mechanisms for absorbing ingested material into the bloodstream.
Mice and humans share almost identical mechanisms for cells to absorb material from the bloodstream, and to excrete them back out after using them.
Mice cells and human cells process these materials in almost identical ways.
Mice and humans share almost identical mechanisms for regulating cell division.
Mice and humans share almost identical mechanisms for excreting waste materials from the bloodstream.
While there are a few things that may fall into the small cracks between these almost identical processes, most people are smart enough to know that just about everything that is harmful to those processes in mice are also harmful to the same processes in humans.
I respect your comments and don't entirely disagree, but "almost" is not the equivalent of being "the same". New drug studies are always initiated in lab animals, but the FDA does not approve new drugs based on results of animal studies alone, they must be assessed in humans before getting final approval. "Almost" is fine if you are dealing with horse shoes or hand grenades, but is a poor substitute for medical evidence.
But to your point, if "almost" is really close enough to "truth", we still have the issue of janitor in the drum doses being administered to mice and not having it accurately correlate with what a human ingests during an equivalent time frame. As I suspect you are aware, toxicity is a result of many factors in humans including but not limited to the dose and duration of exposure. To my way of thinking, that is the crux of the issue.
Some poor rats in a lab got 10 lifetime doses of this stuff and got cancer.... Moderation is the word with anything..
The food purists always scream the sky is falling when it comes to politically incorrect nonfoods like soda. But why not mention the other nonfoods as well? It's just leftie food correctness to only pick on soda.
So let's see, using HPost logic beer now has eevil caramel coloring and that eevil ethanol (oh yes it does..don't argue with me).
Why is HPost anti-Beer? ;-)
The State of California has decided to include 4-MeI—formed naturally in most cooking, broiling, roasting and grilling—on its Proposition 65 list of possible carcinogens...
4-MEI is formed naturally in the process of cooking, roasting, broiling or grilling food of every sort: chicken, beef, vegetables, other meats, and even coffee. It is found in hundreds of home-cooked or store-bought foods that people have been consuming for generations. It is not an additive.
http://www.foodproductdesign.com/news/2011/02/dd-williamson-responds-to-cspi-caramel-color-clai.aspx
It may also have a wheat source, I'm told. My mother has Celiac Sprue and will react to some caramel coloring.
Best to avoid it entirely.
you give us advice to avoid something because of health reasons but you have no clue where it comes from. Either look it up before giving us advice or don't comment at all.
Don't comment if you're going to be rude.
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I'm working on a new theory.
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