Gatorade to drop BVO after consumer complaints

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/01/11/brominated-vegetable-oil-in-us-soda.aspx

 All in all, about 10 percent of all sodas sold in the U.S. contain BVO, so it pays to read the list of ingredients. Better yet, make a concerted effort to eliminate soda from your diet altogether. With or without BVO, sodas contain so many ingredients harmful to your health—high fructose corn syrup being one of the foremost culprits—that they really have noredeeming value whatsoever.

And please do not make the mistake of switching from regular soda to diet, as artificial sweetened drinks may be the worse of two evils. Also beware of drinks containing sodium benzoate, and Yellow Dye #5. The latter is also known as tartrazine, and has been banned in Norway, Austria and Germany due to its ill health effects.

"Natural flavors" have some interesting definitions as apparently Natural flavor Vanilla can be created from wood pulp unless from the vanilla bean,

The FDA Does Not Check Food Label Accuracy

Food labels fall very closely into the realm of "anything goes" in the food-processing world. While the FDA does check food labels, they only check to see whether or not the Nutrition Facts panel is present, rather than whether or not it is true and accurate.

They do not look for deceptive "0 trans-fat" claims and misleading "made with real fruit" or "all natural" statements.

The FDA estimates that roughly one out of every 10 food product labels contain inaccuracies. Additionally, you need to be aware of the fact that a food label must be more than 20 percent off in order for it to violate federal law, and government food labs have a 10 percent margin of error.

This means that an item labeled as having 400 calories can legally have up to 480 calories, and the 10 percent margin of error can bring it up to over 500.

Likewise, blueberry muffins can be called "blueberry muffins" even if they do not contain actual blueberries, but rather artificial blueberry-flavored bits. Other products that list milk on their label may actually contain non-fat powdered milk, palm oil, sugar and additives -- the chemical "equivalent" of milk -- instead.

This is true even when a food claims to be "all natural"

TRUTH ABOUT TASTES

America's favorite ice cream is flavored with wood pulp, and
many soft drinks owe their sweetness to coal. There are hardly ever any cherries
in a cherry lollipop, or bananas in banana cake. Maple syrup need not come from
the tree that bears this name, and a chocolate cookie can contain only a trace
of chocolate.

If this information comes as any surprise to you, just read the
list of ingredients printed on soda bottles, candy bars, cookie boxes or
packages of prepared foods. Down in the small print you are almost sure to read
the words, "artificial flavoring."

What is the reason? Are not natural flavors good enough? Of
course they are; they often taste better than the artificial. But they present
many problems. The most obvious is that of cost. Strange as it seems, it is
cheaper to make peach flavor in the laboratory than to squeeze and concentrate
the natural juice. You can often get the real thing, if you are prepared to pay
for it.

"It is not necessarily better, though," insist chemists at
Dodge & Olcott, which makes flavors as well as smells. Many natural
products, for example, do not like to be cold.

"Make mine vanilla," cry more than half of America's
enthusiastic ice-cream eaters.

It just so happens that vanilla loses some of its taste when it
gets too cold. In addition, pure vanilla is likely to have a somewhat fatty
taste. It is better when mixed with vanillin, a synthetic made out of wood pulp.

"A number of other natural flavors have not kept up with the
times, either," adds a food manufacturer. "They are not up to date."