Sciencebase has just received some additional information from Sense About Sense on the benzene in soft drinks debacle. SAS, is a UK organisation that promotes an evidence-based approach to scientific issues (something that all organisation should be promoting to be honest!).
Anyway, according to their spokesman (Cambridge chemist Jonathan Goodman), one would have to drink almost a litre (800 ml) of soft drink containing five times the WHO limit to match exposure from a single car journey. This is a comparison to that made by Richard Laming of the BSDA who says that someone living in a city consumes, on average, 400 micrograms of benzene from exhaust fumes in a normal day, which is equivalent to consuming 40 litres of a soft drink containing benzene at just over the World Health Organization guideline level of 10 parts per billion.
SAS also told us that benzoate does indeed degrade to benzene, as other media reports claimed. However, either of the possible reaction pathways, while plausible, “are probably very slow.”