One of the dirty secrets of the soft drink and processed food industries is sodium benzoate. It is a benzene compound that is produced by mixing benzoic acid with sodium hydroxide. It is a common preservative in processed foods and soft drinks. It has been associated with a vast array of health problems, including all of our major epidemics. Sodium benzoate is considerably more toxic than either processed sugar or high fructose corn syrup, yet it gets very little media coverage. It is a bona fide poison. Outside of our foods, benzene is the main ingredient of Liquid Wrench, various paint stripper products, rubber cements, and spot removers, due it its highly destructive and solvent qualities. It was discontinued in rubber manufacture in the U.S. because it caused a large percentage of workers to get leukemia.
Whenever sodium benzoate is exposed to vitamin C, it forms pure benzene. It is astounding that our chemical industry found a method through which they could make vitamin C dangerous. Virtually all soft drinks currently have added synthetic vitamin C in the form of ascorbic acid, as if that would make the drinks healthy. This leads to the inevitable creation of dangerous benzene. Its inclusion causes a decrease of red blood cells, a severe depression of the immune system which produces generalized allergy symptoms, leukemia, various other blood cancers, and pre-cancerous blood conditions.
Countries throughout Europe have been pressuring the food industry to voluntarily remove sodium benzoate from products, before more aggressive action is taken. Several European media outlets have called for an absolute ban on this toxic preservative due to concerns about children's developmental safety. The U.S. Government and media have remained disturbingly silent. As usual, there have been no studies in the U.S. about the chemical's effects upon children, but it is studied elsewhere. The chemical industry in the United States is well protected, and studying its effects upon children in the United States would be career suicide for any researcher, as has happened with many researchers of fluoride. Meanwhile, thousands of children are dying of leukemia.
