BPA found in canned foods marketed to kids
Posted by Lisa McTigue Pierce -- Packaging Digest, 9/21/2011 7:40:59 AM
Spokespeople discuss findings at www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqEBLSljvU.
A new report released by the Breast Cancer Fund documents the presence of the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in canned foods marketed to children. Every food sample tested positive for the chemical, with Campbell's Disney Princess and Toy Story soups testing the highest.
Exposure to BPA, used to make the epoxy-resin linings of metal food cans, has been linked in lab studies to breast and prostate cancer, infertility, early puberty in girls, type-2 diabetes, obesity and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Childhood exposure is of concern because this endocrine-disrupting chemical can affect children's hormonal systems during development and set the stage for later‐life diseases.
"There should be no place for toxic chemicals linked to breast cancer and other serious health problems in our children's food," says Jeanne Rizzo, president/CEO of the Breast Cancer Fund. "We hope this report will shine a spotlight on this issue and encourage companies to seek safer alternatives to BPA."
The new report, "BPA in Kids' Canned Food," found BPA in the following canned food products (levels measured in parts per billion, or ppb, average of two samples):
• Campbell's Disney Princess Cool Shapes, Shaped Pasta with Chicken in Chicken Broth 114 ppb
• Campbell's Toy Story Fun Shapes, Shaped Pasta with Chicken in Chicken Broth 81 ppb
• Earth's Best Organic Elmo Noodlemania Soup, USDA Organic 38 ppb
• Annie's Homegrown Cheesy Ravioli, USDA Organic 31 ppb
• Chef Boyardee Whole Grain Pasta, Mini ABC's & 123's with Meatballs 20 ppb
• Campbell's Spaghettios with Meatballs 13 ppb
"In all of these products—but particularly in the Campbell's Disney Princess and Toy Story soups—a child-sized serving could result in BPA exposure at a level of concern," says Gretchen Lee Salter, policy manager at the Breast Cancer Fund. "Consider the number of servings of canned foods—soups, pastas, vegetables, fruits—that a child eats in a week, in a year, and then throughout her developing years, and you start to see the urgency of getting BPA out of food cans."
"This report shows the that we're all part of a big experiment to see what BPA will do to our kids and us," says William Goodson, M.D., a breast cancer surgeon and senior clinical research scientist at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, who just last week published a study showing that BPA causes non-cancerous cells to grow and survive like cancer cells. "We weren't given any choice about being in this experiment, and it's time for that to change."
Research has also uncovered a relationship between household income and BPA exposure, showing that people with the highest BPA exposure are from the lowest income groups. This data may be attributed to the fact that canned foods are usually cheaper, last longer and are more readily available in low-income neighborhoods than fresh foods.
In response to these findings, the Breast Cancer Fund is launching a "Cans Not Cancer" campaign, urging manufacturers to replace BPA with safer alternatives. Sample consumer letters to Campbell's and other companies highlighted in this report can be found at www.breastcancerfund.org/cansnotcancer.
"Every day, children are being exposed to BPA through canned foods marketed to them using slick advertising and their favorite characters," said Salter. "The Breast Cancer Fund's Cans Not Cancer campaign is about our health, our children's health, and a safer future where breast cancer rates have dropped because we've reduced our exposure to toxic chemicals."
Some canned food companies are already switching to a BPA-free can liner or changing their food packaging altogether. Eden Foods, for example, uses an oleoresinous c-enamel, which is a mixture of an oil and a resin extracted from plants, for some of its canned foods. While some other companies say they are using BPA alternatives, they are not transparent about the alternatives they are using.
At the public policy level, 10 states have restricted BPA in infant food containers. While these laws do not cover the kinds of canned foods tested in this study, they send a strong signal to the marketplace that states are taking action to protect children from harmful chemicals in food packaging. In addition the Breast Cancer Fund is supporting pending federal legislation authored by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would ban BPA from all food and beverage containers.
The "BPA in Kids' Canned Food" report also lists a number of convenient alternatives parents can use in place of canned food including dry or frozen pasta, boxed macaroni and cheese, soups in Tetra Pak cartons (70 percent paperboard combined with thin layers of low density polyethylene and aluminum foil) and frozen or fresh fruits.
The report can be downloaded at www.breastcancerfund.org/bpakids.
Source: Breast Cancer Fund
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It would make it much easier for those of us who are trying to warn the world about the dangers of plastics (esp warm/heated) plastic, if you would put a Facebook (F) share option on your reports. That's how everyone communicates now, so you are limiting your exposure.
Separate matter, but of much concern to us & could affect millions. We just had to replace our water heater. We had to go w/o hot water for 9 days until they could find a titanium heating element & lines THAT ARE NOT ALL THE PLASTIC FLEX TUBING that the bldrs love, the oil lobbiest are happy to push a byproduct that would have to pay to dump. My question is this: when will someone test this (hot/warm) plastic tubing to see if it is the asbestos of 2000? How many will have to die?
Pixie Gresh - 2011-26-9 02:21:16 EDT -
I feel a bit sick to my stomach since I've been feeding my kids these canned products for years. I thought the organic brands would be safer. Now I know better thanks to your article. I work for a protective packaging company that specializes in Military packaging. Ironically, we protect our planes better than our kids.
Than
protectivepackaging.net/military-packaging
Than Nguyen - 2011-21-9 17:33:30 EDT -
I don't have any problems with either side in this discussion but one week you post an EPA study that says there is no problem with BPA and the next week a group says there is a big problem with BPA. No wonder people don't trust any media and even with a study funded by the EPA and performed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, CDC and FDA everyone panics. Surely there must be some scientific body that can be trusted.
CDC, EPA study finds BPA exposure unlikely to cause health effects
Posted by Lisa McTigue Pierce -- Packaging Digest, 9/15/2011 12:55:59 PM
Government scientists recently completed a landmark human exposure study providing definitive evidence that adverse health effects from bisphenol-A (BPA) are highly unlikely. Funded entirely by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the study was conducted by a team of expert researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In the paper to be published in September 2011 in the Journal of Toxicological Sciences, researchers found that even when a typical diet was altered to ensure that high concentrations of BPA were ingested, the levels of non-metabolized BPA (that is, "free" BPA) in blood were below the level of detection. That is several orders of magnitude lower than levels associated with potentially adverse health effects.
"This study offers definitive evidence that even the highest exposure levels of BPA from food contact application did not allow for measurable amounts of the chemical to be detected in the human blood stream," says Dr. John Rost, chairman of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance Inc. (NAMPA). "This study is important for consumers because, despite all the media hype about the dangers of BPA, it debunks the myth that BPA exposure through diet is harmful."
The clinical exposure study, the first of its kind, collected blood and urine samples from 20 volunteers who consumed three meals of canned foods lined with a BPA-based coating. While studies examining the amount of BPA people are consuming through diet have been extensively researched, such studies are not helpful for assessing possible impacts on human health.
Measuring the amount of BPA entering the body does not assess levels of free BPA found in the bloodstream, or how efficiently it is metabolized and removed from the bloodstream. The EPA study is the most sophisticated analysis of internal exposure, or how the body processes BPA. It is critical to understand the internal exposure and metabolic processing of BPA in people to assess effectively whether the oft-referenced animal studies actually are relevant to human exposure.
"People have heard that 93 percent of the U.S. population have BPA in them, but the mere presence of BPA doesn't mean it is harmful," Rost continues. "What people aren't told is that the BPA is measured as the BPA-metabolite in urine, which means the human body is metabolizing and clearing it efficiently and effectively from the body."
The study results indicate that the human body is extremely efficient at processing BPA from the body and is so effective that levels of free BPA are undetectable.
• Free BPA was below the limit of detection in all 320 blood samples analyzed by the CDC lab, even for samples with detectable total BPA. Based on their results, the authors note that high levels of BPA in blood reported in other studies are unlikely to be valid.
• Total BPA was detected in only 14 percent of the 320 blood samples, only one of which was above 1 part per billion (ppb). Total BPA was below the sensitive limit of detection (0.3 ppb) for 86 percent of the samples.
The work of researchers Teeguarden et al. demonstrates for the first time in a large clinical study that because of the way BPA is processed in the body, it is highly unlikely that BPA could cause health effects. Moreover, the findings call into question other studies reporting high levels of BPA in spot testing of urine or blood. The authors suggest that "infrequent positive determinations near the detection limit should be suspect" and "thus, some attributions of high blood BPA concentrations from oral exposure seem implausible."
The findings raise serious questions of the human relevance of many, if not all, studies that have purported to show adverse effects from BPA, and or studies that use methods of exposure that bypass the normal metabolic pathway from oral exposure in humans. Scientists and toxicologists across the globe have hailed the study as "beautifully designed" in Forbes and agree with the findings that indicate health effects from BPA in the general population are unlikely at best.
The study can be found at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21705716.
Jim Seidel - 2011-21-9 14:10:02 EDT
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