Mountain Dew Code Red: Another chemical composition exposed

March 21, 2013 |

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.jpg

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

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

 Values

Mountain Dew Code   Red

Brisk Iced Tea

Health Risk

6.75

12.75

Nutritional Value

0.11

0.06

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!

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

Comments (14)

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  1. benamore says:

    Who wants to drink a chemical swill with 92 mg of artificial colors and 324 mg of caffeine? I wouldn’t…

  2. Scott says:

    So you don’t like it… you don’t care for the ingredients… don’t drink it! I know DAMN WELL it’s not the healthiest thing, but I enjoy the taste of it, and I’m not dead yet… so I’ll continue to enjoy it. By the way, your grammar and writing composition are horrible. Also, I’ve never seen “spring water” as an ingredient in any Mountain Dew.

    • DyeDiet DyeDiet says:

      They list “mountain spring water” in Sparkling Ice, not in Mountain Dew. You are right: don’t like – don’t drink. But unfortunately so many consumers, including young moms and little children have no clue of what the ingredients are and what health effects they may cause over time. My goal is to inform the consumers, not to preclude them from ingesting chemicals. So you enjoy drinking solutions of potentially dangerous chemicals? Fine! Freedom of choice is yours. And you right, my writing is imperfect because I am not a professional writer; I am a professional chemist working to help you to realize how many biologically hostile chemicals are in our food and to reject them, if you wish. Good luck!

  3. tim roberts says:

    I love this stuff. Tastes great, lots of energy, and it looks like blood when you throw it up while mixing it with vodka. 🙂

  4. Kenny Helka says:

    I love Code Red. It is the greatest drink ever made and i dont care what is in it. Thank you for informing me about this but i will still probably dring two a day still. ;D

  5. wolfy says:

    Code Red is by far the nastiest soda I have ever tried. I have quit soda and become vegan. No more crap foods- and I feel great!

  6. tiara says:

    I drunk this yesterday and I been throwing up since help please

    • DyeDiet DyeDiet says:

      Please quit drinking ANY soda and consult with your doctor.

      • Slyan says:

        Two years too late, they’re dead now (I don’t really know that but yikes in a way) and ah… to poison myself or not poison myself with the dew’s. Chugged that shit back in 2005 after I finished high school. A soda a day generally at most these days.