Take The BPA Challenge

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Expert Opinion

Monday, July 11, 2011

Janelle Sorensen, Chief Communications Officer, Healthy Child Healthy World:

Bisphenol A (BPA), the ubiquitous hormone-disrupting chemical found in everything from plastic and thermal receipts to aluminum cans and dollar bills, rarely goes a week without making the headlines.

Here’s the latest - good and bad.

Two weeks ago, the historically conservative American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a policy to officially recognize BPA as an endocrine-disrupting agent and to urge that products containing BPA be clearly labeled. The AMA's policy urges a "shift to a more robust, science-based, and transparent federal regulatory framework for oversight of BPA" and even supports a ban on selling products for babies that contain BPA.

Meanwhile, according to MedPage Today, the federal government is spending $30 million in research to pin down health risks associated with BPA - an economic commitment that begs a few questions:

Why are tax-payers shouldering the expense of these tests and not the manufacturers? (Especially during a time when fundamental social services like education are increasingly facing budget cuts?)
Why aren’t these tests conducted prior to a chemical being used in everyday products?
Isn’t there enough evidence of risk?

In regards to that final question, studies have shown that BPA can mimic the action of estrogen and may be linked to male sexual dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, liver abnormalities, and breast cancer. Even more evidence has come to light in the past two weeks:

“BPA makes male mice less macho,” declares Science News in a recent article highlighting two new studies that link feminized behaviors in adult males with BPA exposures during development. In one study, some behaviors in BPA-exposed females morphed into features characteristic of males.
Another study examined environmental degradation of BPA. As reported in Chemical & Engineering News,“significant amounts of BPA end up in the environment, where bacteria could transform it to compounds with unknown properties and health effects.” Researchers selected 4 common bacteria and found they convert BPA into compounds even more toxic than BPA. The tests have only been conducted in the lab in regards to impacts on fish, but - still - it does not bode well.
Yet another new study found that prenatal exposure to low levels of BPA caused rats to become obese and unhealthy as adults. Interestingly, according to Environmental Health News, the effects were seen at a low dose currently considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency but not at a medium or high dose.

What Can You Do?

A study from the Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute published this spring found that when families ate fresh food—not canned or packaged in plastic—for three days, their BPA levels dropped an average of 60 percent. So, we’re challenging you to ‘Kick the Can’ this July!

‘Kick the Can’ is a campaign of the Breast Cancer Fund and we’re joining in to take this challenge and send a message to manufacturers that we want BPA out of food cans, out of our food and out of our bodies. Will you accept the challenge, too?

Sign the pledge to kick the can this month.
Check out these tips for navigating the grocery store can-free and easily making BPA-free food.

We'll also be delivering the message to top canned food manufacturers that you and thousands of others want BPA replaced with a safe alternative in all canned foods. After receiving 20,000 messages since April, these companies are on notice that it shouldn't be up to us to make sure our food is safe.

What are your tips for kicking the can?

Find Out More:

Posted by Andrea on 07/25/2011 at 06:49 AM

We did it. We took the challenge and have officially “kicked the can”. Overall, it didn’t cost us that much ($4 total). And we didn’t have to give up much - just a few brand swaps - no taste sacrifice.

For us, the biggest surprise was probably how few companies actually use BPA free cans. We found only a handful. (Don’t you just love Eden Foods?)

If you’re interested in seeing how we did it, check out http://talesofgoodness.com/2011/07/21/kick-the-can-take-the-bpa-challenge/. Now we just need to make it stick!

Good luck to all who take this on!

Posted by Betsy (Eco-novice) on 07/17/2011 at 08:45 PM

I am happy to say that I have almost entirely “kicked the can” already. I still rely on canned diced tomatoes (which are very acidic, and a prime candidate for leaching of BPA), but this year a friend is going to help me can some of the beautiful organic tomatoes from the farmer’s market myself in glass jars! I’m so excited. I’ll be blogging about that when it happens, probably in October closer to the end of the tomato season here. I hope to can enough to last me through the winter until the next tomato season. We started making our own beans a few years ago with a pressure cooker and I use Better than Bullion for broth.

Posted by Janelle Sorensen on 07/15/2011 at 11:38 AM

Thanks for your work on this issue, Jen! And thanks for sharing your links!

Posted by Jen on 07/12/2011 at 10:09 AM

I stopped eating canned foods that contain BPA a few years ago. Some products took some work to find in a BPA-free version but I’ve found nearly all of them. My blog, SaferChoicesBlog.com, gives you the details on those hard-to-find products that usually only come in cans (condensed cream soups, refried beans, pumpkin pie mix, etc.). Here’s one of the many articles: http://saferchoices.blogspot.com/2011/04/pacific-natural-foods-bpa-free-and.html
It’s not as hard to go BPA-free as you may think, it just takes some research and I’ve done most of the work for you! I also post on Facebook.com/saferchoices Enjoy!

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