Anebriated posted:
Darwynnia posted:
Meh, someone else spammed my facebook newsfeed with this story.
Caramel food coloring has between 0.02-0.002% 4-Methylimidazole, according to Toxnet's sources. So if a 330mL can contains 3 grams of caramel coloring (I have no idea how much a can has) then there's 0.66mg in it. They don't mention how much of it was found in Coke or Pepsi, but if there's 47 ug in the others, then the math would estimate each can has ~ 0.3 grams (since .66 mg = 660 ug) of caramel coloring.
The reported adverse effects from oral doses on animals are at 360 mg/kg of 4-Methylimidazole (convulsions, etc). So comparatively speaking, there's very little 4-Methylimidazole in a soda. Heck you'd have to drink thousands of cans per day to be at a dangerous level. Plus, the halflife estimate for 4-Methylimidazole is 1.8 hours, with the excretion route via urine.
I'm not worried.
you calculated risk of inducing a seizure, not risk of cancer. and since we don't know of the harmful agent is 4-MI itself or a metabolite, 4-MI's half-life isn't all that.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17619857
"Groups of 50 male and 50 female F344/N rats were fed diets containing 0-, 625-, 1,250-, or 2,500 ppm 4MI (males) or 0-, 1,250-, 2,500-, or 5,000 ppm 4MI (females) for 106 weeks.Based on the food consumption the calculated average daily doses were approximately 30, 55, or 115 mg 4MI/kg body weight to males and 60, 120, or 250 mg 4MI/kg to females"
"The incidences of alveolar/bronchiolar adenoma in all exposed groups of females, alveolar/bronchiolar carcinoma in 1,250 ppm males, and alveolar/bronchiolar adenoma or carcinoma (combined) in 1,250 ppm males and 625- and 1,250 ppm females were significantly greater than those in the control groups"
sig. effects at 30mg-60mg/kg a day for 106weeks. i didn't look up their endpoints or redo your calculations because i am lazy. i wonder how many hundreds of other chemicals with a similar risk we expose ourselves to. lol i'm just playing devil's advocate. DC's right, lots of calories and no exercise is a truer culprit. everyday i see so many people on their way to a fat and slow death.
I used the seizure as the adverse effect level since that was what was reported on toxnet.
Still, for us to get close to 20 mg 4MI/KG a day in our diet we would need to drink thousands of cans of soda daily. We'd be dead from water intoxication long before we developed cancer, if each can has ~0.3 mg of caramel coloring.
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