Mountain Dew: the colored twins

As I wrote before, the soft drinks and candy manufacturers do not bother to use their intellectual potential, even if they have it, to design really new products. They simply breed new brands and give different names to the same old set of the ingredients: HFCS, a bunch of preservatives, artificial flavors and the food dyes. This creates a fake diversity: whatever you choose you get your dose of HFCS and feedstock of chemicals. No better are their “diet” versions: instead of HFCS, which after all is a nutrient, you get non-nutritional sucralose or aspartame (read recent reports: ASPARTAME Carcinigenic Effects and Life Span Exposure to Low Doses of Aspartame). We, the consumers, are in a big part responsible for creation of the unhealthy soft drinks market in the US. By continuous buying their primitive HFCS concoctions we support the manufacturers and agree to be further fooled by the food industry. The DyeDiet finds this situation humiliating.

Mountain Dew 20 FL OZ (591 ml) bottles purchased at a local convenience store for $1.50

Let us take a look at Mountain Dew Cod Red and LiveWire of Pepsi. The two are almost identical like twins with one of the flavor preservatives missing in the latter.

See how it works? They add a natural or an artificial flavor and then add THREE more chemicals to preserve it! Also note that the ingredient lists are very similar to that of the Kool-Aid just reviewed. The good news is that Mountain Dew designers decided to sacrifice some of orange juice concentrate for you. But, as if to neutralize an extra nutrient with a harmful counterpart, they have added brominated vegetable oil (BVO) (see Toxic Effects of Brominated Vegetable Oils).

^a Direct detection of Red 40 and Yellow 5 in the presence of Yellow 6 was complicated by the overlapping. Estimated values are given.

Can you still like the Mountain Dew knowing all the above? I don’t know about you but sadly ~5.5 million like it on Facebook! All right, at least the amount of the food dyes is lower than in the Kool-Aid…

Code Red Risk Score, DDRS ~ 87

This one gives you only FOUR nutrients and ELEVEN non-nutritional chemicals! Therefore your risk is high, DDFI = 54/10 ~ 4 and the nutritional value is close to zero, DDNF = 10/78 ~ 0.2

It says on the label: With a rush of cherry flavor. Well, do not be surprised too much if your body will respond with an allergic rash to BVO, food dyes (see CSPI report: Diet, ADHD and Behavior) or benzaldehyde and acetophenone they use to fake cherry.

LiveWire Risk Score, DDRS ~ 84

The other one is almost exact copy of the above: with only FOUR nutrients and TEN non-nutritional additives you get your high health risk of DDFI = 58/13 ~ 4.5 and you do NOT get nutrition you need, DDNF = 13/71 ~ 0.2.

The DyeDiet suggests that risky products like these Mountain Dew drinks must be labeled with the warnings like below to make consumers see the risk and nutrition levels at a very first glance.

As a healthy alternative, consider CapriSun products of Kraft Foods, Inc. (the manufacturer of infamous Kool-Aid!) made with NO preservatives, BVO, artificial flavors and dyes. See, not all and not always the food manufacturers are shameless fake makers!

Let us vote the Mountain Dew (and the like) drinks out of the stores by not buying them!

Tags: dye diet, food additives, food colors, food dyes, food dyes exposure, food reviews, Food Risk Score, HFCS, Mountain Dew, nutritional value, soft drinks

Category: American diet, Food Dyes Exposure, Soft drinks