Mountain Dew == Headache
Every time I drink Mountain Dew, without fail, 20 minutes later I get a raging headache.

I thought it was because it had so much caffeine, so I looked it up on this chart to discover that Mountain Dew has 55mg of caffeine per 12 oz can. Well, considering that I usually have a quad iced venti latte every morning as well, which contains 4-6 oz of espresso, yielding a delicious jolt of 200-300 mg of caffeine, I decided that our friend C₈H₁₀N₄O₂ isn't the cuprit.

Instead I thought I'd look up the other major ingredient in Mountain Dew: sugar. However, Mountain Dew only has 46g of sugar, a mere 5g over Cherry Coke, which never gives me a headache.

Praise Jupiter for the Tubes of the Internets. Caffeine is not the culprit, nor is sugar, so on a whim I decided to go to Mountain Dew's Wikipedia entry, where I found a most interesting paragraph at the top:

Mountain Dew contains tartrazine (“FD&C Yellow No. 5” in the US), which could lead to allergic reactions in some people. This has also led to an urban legend that the Yellow No. 5 in Mountain Dew reduces the sperm count of male drinkers. This is, however, false. Mountain Dew, along with many other citrus flavoured sodas, contains citric acid and sodium benzoate. Recent reports to the FDA indicate that Mountain Dew and other soft drinks may contain high levels of benzene that are above the FDA's limit for public drinking water. The source of the benzene appears to be from a reaction of citric acid and sodium benzoate. There has been a call, recently, for soft drink companies to address the toxic chemical reaction that takes place in many similar beverages. Diet Mountain Dew contains aspartame. Mountain Dew's brominated vegetable oil (BVO) is another source of contention.

Well now the list of potentially bad items grows: tartrazine, according to the article, is the most egregious offender, which, according to its own Wikipedia entry is "banned in Norway and was banned in Austria and Germany, before EU regulations lifted the ban again." And in 2001, Heather Brodie Perry, a Reference Librarian at Stonehill College in Eastern Massachusetts, wrote a petition to the FDA to delist tartrazine (A.K.A. FD&C Yellow 5). I called Heather by phone and she told me that over 2000 people had signed her petition, which has yet to be closed by the FDA.

So is tartrazine causing an allergic reaction in me? Or are my headaches caused by the carcinogen benzine, or the allegedly brain-tumor-causing aspartame, or the toxic and indigestable traces of bromine contained in the brominated vegetable oil?

Heather suggested that I do a comparison with other products with similar amounts of tartrazine. She cited Tang as a good comparator. Looks like it's a Tang weekend for me!

(Special thanks to Heather Brodie Perry for being so nice when a random internet wacko--me--called her out of the blue!)
- posted by frank crist @ 5:25 PM