Some Bisphenol A With Your Green Beans?

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Guest Blogger

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Erika Schreder, Staff Scientist, Washington Toxics Coalition:

Nine out of ten. According to a study released today, those are your chances of having some bisphenol A (BPA) with tonight’s dinner, if canned food is on your menu. New testing for BPA sampled 50 cans of food and drinks, and found that the hormone-disrupting chemical is a near ubiquitous presence in canned food.

The study, titled No Silver Lining and published by the National Work Group for Safe Markets, found what appears to be the highest level of BPA ever detected in canned food. A can of Del Monte green beans from a Wisconsin pantry clocked in at 1140 parts per billion BPA, several times greater than the highest levels reported by other recent studies.

Dr. Laura Vandenberg, a leading BPA researcher at Tufts University, reviewed the results.

“The levels found in this study are definitely concerning, and indicate that the time has come to remove this chemical from food cans,” she said.

BPA turns up in canned food because it is a component of the epoxy lining used in most cans in the United States. But it’s not the only option: Eden Foods has used an alternative for most of its cans for several years, and General Mills recently announced that its cans of Muir Glen tomatoes will soon be BPA-free.

While public attention has focused on the use of BPA in baby bottles, its presence in canned food is potentially even more troubling. Research on BPA indicates children’s period of greatest vulnerability comes before they’re using baby bottles—it’s before they’re born. And if their moms are exposed to BPA during pregnancy, the chemical travels to the fetus where it can disrupt development in a number of ways.

Bobbi Chase Wilding, report co-author and study participant, was pregnant when she submitted a sample of canned food from her pantry for testing. She reflected,

“As a mother of two daughters, I’ll always wonder if BPA exposure during pregnancy and while breastfeeding will play a role in their health. It’s a risk I wouldn’t have taken willingly, and one no mother should have to take at all.”

To calculate how much BPA we are actually ingesting from canned food, the study authors created hypothetical menus and added up the dose based on the study results. They found that an averaged-sized woman who consumed any of the three sample menus would be exposed to BPA at higher levels than those that caused reproductive problems and increased chances of breast cancer in laboratory studies.

Given the lack of any margin of safety with BPA exposures just from this one source—canned food—advocates are calling for immediate action to replace BPA in can linings with safer materials. Nationally, the Senate is expected to vote soon on the Food Safety Modernization Act, which could include a phaseout of BPA in food and drink containers.

The Safe Chemicals Act, recently introduced in Congress, could have broader impact on BPA and other chemicals that disrupt hormones, harm the nervous or reproductive system, or cause cancer. Join the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition in asking Congress to strengthen the Act to make sure that it includes strict timelines for reducing the use of such chemicals. Maybe hormone disruptors and cancer-causing chemicals won’t be on the dinner menu in 2012.

The Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition represents more than 11 million individuals and includes parents, health professionals, advocates for people with learning and developmental disabilities, reproductive health advocates, environmentalists and businesses from across the nation, united by their common concern about toxic chemicals in our homes, places of work, and products we use every day. Please take a moment to learn more about what we want.

Thumbnail Image Courtesy of ccharmon / CC BY-SA 2.0

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of Healthy Child Healthy World.