Brominated Vegetable Oil (Making orange soda look more like OJ)

When you mix bromine with another molecule that has a carbon-carbon double bond, the bromine can add across the double bond.

i-ff20abc2df157ef3887cf7ab6a140240-bromination.png

The bromine atoms are very heavy - about 80 times as heavy as a hydrogen atom, or 7 times as heavy as a carbon atom. Bromination usually gives you a molecule that has higher density than the parent molecule.

Vegetable oil - which has a density of about 0.9 grams per milliliter - can be made as dense as water (i.e., 1 gram per milliliter) by adding the right amount of bromine.

i-365800bd0a2e8e06ff8cea66adfc65b3-bvo.png

Brominated vegetable oil can give an emulsion in water that is opaque and visually pleasing - it turns up in all kinds of opaque sodas and sugar/sport drinks. Is it OK to ingest bromine? Just about everyone gets away with the small amount he takes in from the occasional soda, but it's definitely possible to ingest too much - awhile back, there was a case of a person who drank as much as a gallon a day of BVO-containing soda. Turns out, he got bromine poisoning!

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so how come that no ones concerned about the ingestion of alkylating agents (which alkyl bromides are) which are potentially genotoxic. Have these things been tested?

By Tony Ward (not verified) on 19 Jul 2011 #permalink

Jeeze! "2 to 4 liters per day" doesn't sound so far out of the range of normal consumption. I always thought that "brominated vegetable oil" sounded dangerous - now I KNOW it is!

I'll second the "good to have you back".

third it.

Good to see you back

By chemoptoplex (not verified) on 19 May 2010 #permalink

Hi all;
A fatal flaw was that they failed to have any representative posts ready to go up when the blog went live.

Had they done so, and had the content been surprisingly acceptable, the reception might have been better.

Instead we get this "Hi! Welcome to ShillBlog!" (crickets) and everyone, quite reasonably, expects the worst.

Isn't bromination stereospecific? If so why did you draw wavy bonds?

I just found this blog and love it! But it's not daily, like the title promises. Any chance it can be?

By Katherine (not verified) on 27 Jul 2010 #permalink

Would brominated oleic acid be considered a saturated fat?

wonder how easy it would be to make. Sounds like you could just mix bromine water and veggie oil :P

coolsciencetech.blogspot.com

2 to 4 liters a day is normal consumption? Really? If you're drinking that much soda a day I think you have worse problems. It's all sugar.