Armenians deem carbonated beverages innutritious and inorganic

PanARMENIAN.Net - Head of the State Service for Food Safety at Armenian Ministry of Agriculture warns consumers against purchasing carbonated beverages.

“The product can’t be nutritious if it is inorganic,” Abram Bakhchagulyan told a press conference in Yerevan, commenting on recent statements of scientists on the harm the beverages do.

According to him, science workers’ publications on the one hand render the harm the drinks do, on the other hand the scientists say it hasn’t been proved yet.

“There is also an entrepreneurship problem, anti-advertisement and withdrawal from the market,” Mr. Bakhchagulyan said.

According to BBC, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are changing the recipes for their drinks to avoid putting a cancer warning label on the bottle, to comply with California laws.

The new recipe for caramel coloring in the drinks has less 4-methylimidazole - a chemical which California has added to its list of carcinogens.

The change to the recipe has already been introduced in California. But the companies say rolling out the new recipe across the US makes the drinks more efficient to manufacture.

"While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning," Coca-Cola representative Diana Garza-Ciarlante told the Associated Press.

The chemical has been linked to cancer in mice and rats, according to one study, but there is no evidence that it poses a health risk to humans, said the American Beverage Association, which represents the wider industry.