Kid’s food commonly laced with BPA
It seems unsurprising that Bisphenol-A, when used in the linings of cans holding food, appears as well in the food. This substance mimics hormones in the body: not a good thing to ingest, particularly bad for pregnant women and young children. But: industry likes using Bisphenol-A. So our government totally does not know what to do: protect children and the environment? or do what its corporate masters demand? It’s quite a dilemma, as you can imagine.
Janet Raloff has a Science News article about a recent finding:
The San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund has just released some provocative data on the presence of bisphenol A — a hormone-mimicking pollutant — in every brand-name canned food it tested.
Then again, it only tested a dozen cans. And considering there were two replicates of each type (one purchased in California, the other in Wisconsin), that means it examined only six foods for BPA, a constituent of food-grade plastics and metal-food-can liners.
Partially compensating for the new study’s small size, the Breast Cancer Fund argues, is that the items it focused on are “marketed to and consumed by children.”
Labels on three of those products have cartoon or Sesame Street figures, two others mention having the taste kids love and the last has a bunny on the label with kid-sized pasta inside. Since U.S. health agencies have identified developing children as being most at risk for any adverse effects of BPA, kids’ entrees and serving ware are precisely where we’d least like to find the contaminant.
Still, three soups and three pasta dishes hardly represent a reasonable cross-section of canned goods, even those typically fed to kids. So it would be hard to estimate from the values measured in these foods — from 34 to 148 parts per billion in the soups and from 10 to 34 ppb in the pasta products — a child’s weekly (much less annual) intake of foodborne BPA.
To get a better gauge of that, parents might want to consult findings of a study that we reported on four months ago (almost to the day). In that investigation, Food and Drug Administration chemists turned up the estrogen-mimicking BPA in 71 of 78 canned goods sampled.
If the Breast Cancer Fund study had been peer reviewed (which it wasn’t), reviewers should certainly have required a comparison of the newfound BPA values with previously reported amounts.
FDA, for instance, found that a number of foods that children often eat — among them canned tuna and vegetables — had BPA tainting of 300 to more than 700 ppb. Canned pasta and meat products, by contrast, tended to be on the low end of the range of BPA contamination that FDA chemists measured (and within the ballpark just reported by the Breast Cancer Fund).
The North American Metal Packaging Alliance — whose members make food cans — puts a rather upbeat spin on the Breast Cancer Fund’s findings, saying that . . .
