Mountain Dew Code Red: Another chemical composition exposed

Why Do We Like Being Fooled?

If you are a soda drinker there is a good chance that you have been fooled by the beverage industry many times. What has become typical for the American soft drink practices is to put pictures of beautiful fruits accompanying by the word “natural” so that your first intuitive impression is like you look at something healthy. But you will be grossly disappointed when you start reading the list of ingredients: Most often the content is just water contaminated with a bunch of added chemicals and “natural” refers to a flavor, not to a fruit.

Example of another kind is presented in recent review of Sparkling Ice Black Raspberry in which doubled amount of artificial color Red 40 was detected in comparison with what it was a year before. Now you ingest whooping ~ 50 mg of the azo dye with every glass. But they keep trying to impress those who read ingredients by listing “carbonated mountain spring water” as the main ingredient. Why to “improve” perfectly safe natural spring water by adding a bunch of potentially health-damaging chemicals? Because WE like it and because WE keep buying it! And Mountain Dew Code Red is an example of yet one more kind: lousy label design (perhaps good enough for a toilet bowl cleaner!) and honest front label statement “with a rush of cherry flavor and other natural flavors.” Note, there are no cherries, no natural fruits. And yet Mountain Dew enjoys 7,807,736 likes on Facebook. It is amazing ignorance or careless or both…

DyeDiet Doesn’t Buy It!

Mountain Dew Code Red: Risk, Nutrition and Dye Content

This red swill contains unknown amount of orange juice concentrate, lots of sodium, 320 mg of caffeine, 69 teaspoons of high fructose corn syrup, and three artificial colorants of 92 mg per bottle combined plus three more bio-chemically hostile additives. How can YOU like drinking this chemical pollution? Wake up, if you still can…

Food Additives to Avoid

• Three artificial colorants, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Blue 1 (see also: Blue colon at autopsy and Re-evaluation of Blue 1 as a food additive). European Parliament has ordered in 2003 to ban use of certain azo dyes even in consumer goods like textile (cloth, bedding, towels, etc.) because of dangers of regular skin contact: European Ban on Certain Azo Dyes. Why we in America allowed eating them on daily basis? Also read Summary of Summary of Studies on Food Dyes and another summary Studies on Dyes.
• Brominated vegetable oil mimics natural triglycerides when sneaking onboard to your body. When inside, after broken down with pancreatic lipase to mono-glycerides and the brominated fatty acids, toxic pieces are built into the tissue cells all over your body (including your brain!) leading to degradation of muscles, liver, kidneys, heart and brain. See attached file: Toxic Effects of Brominated Vegetabl Oils
• Calcium disodium EDTA, may prevent absorption of vitamins
• Sodium benzoate may produce small amounts of benzene – human carcinogen

According to the list ingredients the Dye Diet Calculator indicates that Mountain Dew Code Red makes you taking health risk of 6.75 and getting essentially zero nutritional value of 0.11. If you look at the calculation for Brisk Iced Tea you will see about twice higher health risk and half the nutritional value.

Dye Diet Calculator: Compare and understand the results

Do these numbers mean that Brisk Iced Tea is twice as toxic as Mountain Dew Code Red? Well, it could be so but please make no mistake: the Dye Diet Calculator gives you relative values based on number of potentially dangerous ingredients whereas actual toxicity is always a function of the actual amount of chemicals present in a product. Say, it was detected that Brisk Iced Tea contains ~ ¼ of the amount of Red 40 detected in Mountain Dew Code Red. Then it follows that toxicity of the former with regard to Red 40 is four times lower than the one of the latter. But we have a number of other additives in these two products with unknown amounts. Therefore even relative actual toxicity cannot be concluded from the Dye Diet Calculator results. However, when risks are unknown we can exercise Precautionary Principle and the Dye Diet Calculator helps you to identify and make your decision about suspicious ingredients and products in our food supply. So from the above calculation results you conclude that the both products, Mountain Dew Code Red and Brisk Iced Tea have unacceptable high health risks and unacceptable low nutritional values with longer list of suspicious food additives in the last one. No, you will not die twice if one product is twice the toxicity of the other. It is better to avoid both of them altogether: “Better Safe Than Sorry.”

Bottom line. Mountain Dew Code Red is a chemical composition which may damage your health if consumed regularly for an extended period of time, say, a few months. Use the Dye Diet Calculator to keep tracking potentially dangerous food additives you may want to avoid. Tap water filtered with use of Reverse Osmosis systems would be much healthier and more economical choice in a long run. Also you can choose from beverages listed in Dye Diet Recommended products. Hydrate yourself straight!

Tags: artificial color content, dye diet, Dye Diet Calculator for processed food, Dye Diet Calculator of nutrition, food dyes exposure, Mountain Dew Code Red chemical content, Mountain Dew Code Red health effects

Category: Food and cancer, Food Dyes Exposure, Food Terrorism, Soft drinks