In 1990, manufacturers were supposed to get the benzene out of their soft drinks. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which discovered the problem, never made it public because the US soft drinks association promised to “get the word out” and fix the benzene problem themselves. 1

The “word” to “get out” is sodium benzoate, a common preservative. In the presence of an acid it breaks down into several things, including benzene, a carcinogenic, highly regulated chemical. Unfortunately, many soft drinks are naturally acidic, espe- cially fruit based ones that contain vitamin C (ascor bic acid). The remedy is simple if you know it: don’t use sodium benzoate to preserve acidic drinks. But in Europe, Latin America and North America over 1,500 soft drink products containing sodium benzoate and either citric acid or ascorbic acid have been introduced since January 2002. In formulations like that the FDA has confirmed that benzene does form at parts per billion (ppb) levels.

Are parts per billion levels dangerous? Yes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2 . The safe level is zero ppb because anything above that is hazardous, although the maximum allowable level in drinking water is 5 ppb only because at the present time we can’t reliably remove benzene any better than that. Some soft drinks tested by an independent lab show benzene levels at 10 ppb! How dangerous? Short-term effects include temporary nervous system disorders, immune system depression, anemia, and long-term effects are chromosome aberrations and cancer. That’s what you are risking when you consume a soft drink from an American or foreign source that didn’t “get the word”.

Minutes from a meeting between FDA and the National Soft Drinks Association in 1990-1 show FDA officials chose to protect soft drink manufacturers from “adverse publicity associated with this problem”. Instead of litigation, or legislation, they near sightedly chose to trust the industry to “get the word out”. Legislation prohibiting sodium benzoate in acidic beverages would have served the public better, because although FDA tests in 1993 indicated the problem was gone, obviously the verbal solution did not last.