Hands Off My Plastic Stuff

One thing that I have truly come to value is people who tell it as it is. No fancy language, no complicated back story, no BS. Just the facts.

Which is why I want to give a major shout out to Adam Dachis. Dachis is a senior writer for the weblog Lifehacker, which aims to provide “tips and downloads for getting things done.” Sounds good to me.

In a recent post to the site, Dachis provided some straight-shooting, invaluable advice: Stop freak out about BPA in plastic bottles. Drink your water. You’ll be fine.

BPA can be a dangerous chemical if over-consumed, but the amount that ends up in your water isn’t going to harm you. You’d be more likely to hurt by drinking too much water… before that could happen. Most anything can be bad in excess, but in small amounts there isn’t cause for concern.

The post also includes a video with Brian Dunning from the myth-busting web series inFact, who breaks down the plastic water bottle conspiracy in detail. It’s a great watch, and I highly recommend it.

Props to both Dunning and Dachis for doing their part to get the truth — and I mean the actual, scientifically-backed truth — about BPA out.

As a high school student, I went a couple rounds with my parents over whether or not a lie of omission is really, you know, alielie. Spoiler alert: it is.

Which is why I feel like reports on the results of a new study about the effects of fetal exposure to BPA in monkeys are lying.

An article in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel outlined the study, in which researchers fed pregnant monkeys a piece of fruit containing BPA everyday during their third trimester of pregnancy, and then looked at the mammary glands of the resulting female offspring. The researchers found changes in the glands that give rise to dense tissue, which can be a risk factor for breast cancer in humans.

On the surface it sounds like it should be scary stuff, but what the report doesn’t mention is that only a handful of animals were tested, and the dose of BPA used was significantly higher than that of typical human exposure.

“It’s hard to see the study’s relevance to humans, as only four or five animals were tested and the dose used was 10,000 times higher than typical human exposure to BPA, as documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s large-scale biomonitoring studies…”

Somehow the reports failed to mention those pretty significant details, possible because the researchers know that they make the study irrelevant to humans. Too much of anything is likely to have negative results at some point, but in our day to day lives, we are never at risk for exposure to that much BPA.

The Journal-Sentinel too has a stake in the misleading BPA dialogue. The paper has previously received several awards for its reporting on the dangers of BPA, and likely isn’t thrilled that the Food and Drug Administration has consistently maintained that BPA isn’t dangerous at all. By dedicating time and space to any study that might show BPA is, in fact, harmful the Journal-Sentinel furthers its interests as well. Not exactly journalist integrity as I’ve always understood it, but there you go.

By not telling the whole story, the researchers are able to effectively manipulate their findings to tell the story that they want to be told. What they’re not doing is giving an honest representation of the how the human body reacts to its typical BPA exposure.

Sarah Janssen must be a hard woman to please. I say that because, judging by a post on the Ethical Corporation website, in which the senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is quoted, she seems to have some pretty unrealistic expectations.

Dr. Janssen is upset that her organization’s petition to ban BPA from the food supply was rejected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because it lacked any legitimate scientific basis. But she seems to expect the FDA to do the impossible, in which case she will most certainly be disappointed time and time again.

“The burden is on the FDA to prove BPA is safe for us in food supply.”

It is? Are you sure? Because if the FDA had to prove that everything we came into contact with through our food supply is safe, there would be nothing left in our food supply. Peanuts can cause extreme allergic reactions; undercooked meat can cause food poisoning. I myself have choked on a tortilla chip, and had it not been for a calm and quick-thinking companion, who knows what would have happened. Heck, water is the most necessary substance on earth, and I can think of a couple of different ways in which it can kill you. All of these things must not be up to Dr. Janssen’s standards of safety.

I understand that the NRDC did not get the response to its petition that it was hoping for, and may feel the need to push back against the FDA’s decision. But at least make sense. Nothing can be 100 percent determined to be safe — everything has the potential to be dangerous — but it can be regulated in such a way that it is not harmful. Thatis the true burden of the FDA, and that is exactly what it has done with its decision on BPA.

There’s been a lot of BPA news in the U.S. lately, what with the Food and Drug Administration’s decision that a ban on the chemical for us in food contact applications isn’t necessary, and all the subsequent media response.

Not to be outdone, Europe is buzzing with some BPA news of its own this week.

On Tuesday, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) announced that it has started work on a new risk assessment of BPA, focusing on exposure of “vulnerable groups.”

This is just one of many assessments of BPA that the EFSA has undertaken over the years.

EFSA completed its full risk assessment of BPA in 2006 and set a Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) of 0.05 mg/kg body weight/day for this substance. EFSA has updated its scientific advice on BPA several times since 2006, reconfirming the TDI in 2008, 2010 and 2011. The TDI is an estimate of the amount of a substance, expressed on a body weight basis, that can be ingested daily over a lifetime without appreciable risk. EFSA also evaluated intakes of BPA through food and drink, for adults, infants and children and found that they were all well below the TDI.

So. This will be the EFSA’s fifth assessment in six years. It’s hard for me to imagine that genuine concern is renewed so frequently; rather, I suspect that political forces demanding new assessments are behind the constant — and wasteful — evaluations. The entire body of research will not change from year to year, and demands for repeated assessments waste time, money and brain power, and are ultimately designed to create political pressure on scientists to do the wrong thing.

While the EFSA didn’t give a reason for this newest evaluation, this announcement doesn’t exactly come out of the blue.

You see, dear reader, European Union member states are not all seeing eye-to-eye when it comes to BPA regulation and legislation. And by that I mean, no one agrees with France.

The French Socialist party has proposed a bill that would ban the use of BPA in all food containers by January 1, 2014. Not only is this ban unnecessary, but, as Trevor Butterworth of George Mason University points out, it could cause a barrier on trade.

In an article in Forbes, Mr. Butterworth discusses the objections of several EU members.

So far, the Czech Republic, Holland, Italy, the Slovenia, Spain and the United Kingdom have lodged objections with the European Commission on the grounds that the draft French law does not follow sound science and, if implemented, would function as an internal barrier to trade…

The argument against the draft bill is that France should not unilaterally ban something that other EU members believe is safe, and do so based on a much lower standard of scientific evidence that that employed by the European Union and agreed upon by its members. Moreover, given that BPA is widely used in food safety applications, such as can linings, a complete ban by one member country would effectively create an international trade barrier, with food manufacturers having to reformulate their products if they wanted to compete in the French market.

(P.S. That trade stuff? It would impact the U.S. too.)

While each EU member state has its own food regulator body, the EFSA determines the overall position of the EU. This is where discrepancies can occur. For example, France’s food safety agency, the Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) conducted a hazard assessment of BPA, in which it found that BPA could cause harm.

Forgive me for not ringing alarm bells on that one, but pretty much everything in the world has the ability to cause harm. That doesn’t mean it will.

Which is why the risk assessment that the EFSA conducted is a lot more relevant. In that assessment, the EFSA determined that BPA is not likely to cause harm. EFSA also noted in its response to the ANSES report that ANSES relied on some studies where BPA was injected into animals; EFSA rightly concluded that these studies are inapplicable to humans, and did not consider them.

The EFSA will conduct its latest reassessment over the next year, taking into consideration any new studies that emerge and making a determination by May 2013. I’m interested to see how this one plays out, but I’m not too worried for Europe. The EFSA has made the right call on BPA before, and you know what they say about history. It repeats itself.

Truth time: I am an extremely competitive person. I hate to lose, and as such, when I do lose, my first instinct is to find something to blame it on. Someone cheated, someone got extra help. I wasn’t reallywrong; it’s just that the other person was more right. I always want to find a way to make someone else’s victory a little easier for me to swallow.

Susan Freinkel, it seems, is the same way. The difference is that, whereas I generally try to keep my grievances to myself, she airs hers in theWashington Post.

In an article published last week, Freinkel accuses the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of ignoring the emerging science on the dangers of BPA in light of its ruling that the chemical is not harmful and does not need to be banned from food products.

Freinkel cites a study published last year in the journalEnvironmental Health Perspectives, in which researchers put five families on a three-day diet of foods that had not com in contact with plastic. According to Freinkel’s article, “When they compared urine samples before and after the diet, the scientists were stunned to see what a difference a few days could make: The participants’ level of bisphenol A… plunged — by two-thirds, on average…”

I don’t doubt those findings. What I am unsure about is why they’re relevant. BPA is in plastic. No one is denying it. Reducing your exposure to plastic will reduce your exposure to BPA. The point, though, is that BPA is not harmful and the amount of BPA that we are exposed to does not cause negative health effects. That’s why a ban is unnecessary, and why the FDA ruled against one. The study failed to prove that limiting a person’s exposure to BPA does anything other that…limit a person’s exposure to BPA. Presumably Freinkel knew that, but hoped to be able to use the study as a scare tactic anyway.

Conveniently, she makes no mention of the large body of sound, scientific research demonstrating that the levels of BPA in human blood and urine are often so low that they cannot be detected, and pose no threat. As the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) — which reviewed Freinkel’s article — points out, it is those studies that the FDA based its decision on.

It’s also curious that Freinkel doesn’t acknowledge the large body of recent research demonstrating that levels of phthalates and BPA in human blood and urine are often beyond detection and pose no threat. These are the studies the FDA relied on to reach its current position on BPA.

The ACSH also points out a flaw in Freinkel’s argument.

She accuses the FDA of ignoring the ‘emerging science’ on low doses of chemicals — but this so-called science has been emerging for a long time now and it has not attained scientific credibility. No evidence of actual harm to humans has been documented despite all the chemophobic hysteria — such as this pseudo-scientific article.

Look, I can relate to being a sore loser. What I can’t condone, though, is using a national platform and shake examples to decry a government decision based on on sound, scientific evidence. That’s more than sour grapes; it’s irresponsible.

It’s lucky for Meg Kissinger that writing is her medium, as her mouth must be too full of sour grapes to talk right now.

In an article in theMilwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, Kissinger discusses the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent decision to reject a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to ban BPA in food packaging. Though the FDA relied on actual scientific date to make its determination about BPA, Kissinger seems more focused on what the organization didn’t do. It didn’t declare BPA “safe.”

I can’t argue with her there, that’s true. The FDA did not come out and say that BPA is absolutely, 100 percent safe, but no regulatory agency would ever make that kind of blanket statement, and Ms. Kissinger knows that. In its letter responding to the petition, the FDA did say that “there is reasonable certainty that, in the minds of competent scientists, the substance is not harmful under the intended conditions of use.” Sounds good to me.

Of course, I can’t blame her for scraping around the bottom of the barrel to try to come up with a flaw in the FDA’s decision. If I had won a journalism award for uncovering the so-called dangers of a chemical, and then it turned out that that chemical wasn’t dangerous at all, I’d probably feel pretty defensive too.

Oh, did I fail to mention that Kissinger, along with fellow reporter Suzanne Rust, won a “journalism” award for her work on BPA? How silly of me.

In 2009 Kissinger and Rust received a George Polk Award for stepping in “to alert the public of ill health effects cause by exposure” to BPA. They also received a National Journalism Award for public service reporting from the Scripps Howard Foundation for the same work.

So it’s no wonder that Kissinger feels the need to dig at the FDA’s decision; it essentially negates her award-winning reporting. Of course, Kissinger fails to mention any of this in her article from last week. She does take care to mention the paper’s “three-year investigation” and the “emails obtained by the newspaper” and the “tests conducted by the newspaper” all of which evidently proved that BPA is bad and the chemical industry is just trying to cover it up. But she keeps quiet on the recognition she received for that reporting, which doesn’t exactly make her the most unbiased of observers.

She’s also shockingly (sarcasm comes through in writing, right?) quiet about the sound scientific evidence that the FDA relied on in making its recent decision. Kissinger — along with several NRDC employees quoted in her article — seems to want to believe that the FDA reached this conclusion lightly, giving in to industry pressure and ignoring the science. That would probably be a far more convenient truth to serve her purposes, but it’s simply not the case. The FDA response to the petition meticulously outlines the detailed scientific studies that the organization relied on in making its determination.

Your petition asserts that the majority of Americans are exposed to BPA, including fetuses and infants. FDA has reviewed the biomonitoring studies cited in your petition and other information, and agrees that most infants, children and adults, are exposed to low levels of BPA through the diet…FDA has also reviewed pharmacokinetic studies the reported findings from the NCTR studies, which together establish that primates, including humans, quickly and efficiently metabolize BPA into its inactive form, BPA-monoglucuronide, which is then excreted. Consequently, the amount of theactiveBPA circulating internally in humans and the degree to which various potential targets of any toxicity (e.g., cells and organs) are exposed is predicted to be significantly lower than the amount ingested, and even lower — much lower — than seen after a similar exposure by typical non-oral routes (e.g., subcutaneous injections) used in many animal studies, including many of the studies cited in your petition.

And that’s just one section responding to one part of one claim made by the NRDC. The letter goes on and on, carefully explaining the ways in which the petition “failed to provide sufficient data and information to persuade FDA to initiate rulemaking…to revoke regulations permitting the use of BPA in food contact materials,” which ultimately resulted in the FDA denying the petition “it its entirety.”

While I’m sure no one is going to come in and take Ms. Kissinger’s award away, the real victory comes for those of us who have no career plaudits hanging in the balance, and can feel reassured that the FDA is looking out for our best interests by allowing the continued use of a chemical that makes our food consumption safer.

File this in the “Happy Friday” folder:

Today the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected the petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that would have banned BPA from all food and drink packaging.

In its petition the NRDC cited results from studies conducted in rodents and other animals, but as I’ve mentioned, and as the FDA reiterated in its response, those studies cannot be applied to humans.

The agency said the studies cited by NRDC were often too small to be conclusive. In other cases they involved researchers injecting BPA into animals, whereas humans ingest the chemical through their diet over longer periods of time. The agency also said that humans digest and eliminate BPA much more quickly than rats and other lab animals.

Based on the report by the Associated Press, it would seem that the petition had been rejected in its entirety.

I’m not so naive that I believe this decision will end the pervasive anti-BPA rhetoric, or that the NRDC will give up trying to get the chemical unnecessarily banned. I can only hope that some organizations, as well as the general consumer, will have enough trust in the FDA to realize that its rejection of a BPA ban shows that the chemical is not harmful to humans and does not need to be removed from use in food and beverage packaging.

While we may never know if the chicken or the egg came first, there is a debate with obvious origins. Which came first: consumers’ demands for BPA-free products, or the environmental fear mongering rhetoric that BPA is bad?

Crown Prince Seafood recently announced that it is phasing out BPA in its can linings due to “consumer demands.” That would be all well and good, except I have a bad feeling at the pit of my stomach those “demands” are not born out of genuine concern, but rather are stemming from the onslaught of anti-BPA ads and articles.

Environmental groups, such as the Breast Cancer Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, are using junk science to scare consumers into supporting their message, even if it goes against the consumer’s best interests. With the upcoming U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision on the safety of BPA, anti-chemical groups can’t afford to play by the rules, because the facts are not in their favor.

But consumers can’t afford to be taken advantage of either. BPA alternatives may be touted as the cure to all our chemical problems, but really they’re just an untested danger. Even the very people replacing BPA — such as Crown Prince natural products division manager Andrea Linton — know that.

Linton said it was “difficult to say” whether any new can lining could become a one fits all solution such as BPA. “[In]ten years it could have its own problems, that is our fear…”

Call me crazy, but a solution that may result in its own set of problems doesn’t sound like a solution at all. As a consumer myself, I find it hard to believe that others out there would be calling for an untested and unknown replacement for BPA, unless something or someone had scared them senseless. That seems to be exactly the tactic environmental groups are using.

There are dangerous implications to decisions motivated by fear instead of fact, of scare tactics instead of science. Hopefully the FDA will be relying on the latter when it makes its decision at the end of the month, proving once again that BPA is safe for all.

I know I’m in danger of sounding like a broken record in my complaints against the media and its portrayal of the so-called dangers of BPA.

So I’ll take a break, and leave it instead to Alan Caruba — a former journalist and longtime professional writer who can’t stand the media’s unnecessary hype.

In a recent post on his Warning Signs blog, Mr. Caruba makes an excellent point regarding the media and its portrayal of BPA: the media’s lies are not just irresponsible and annoying; they’re actually dangerous.

By spreading the idea that BPA is harmful to humans, thereby supporting those calling for its ban, the media is actually endangering our lives more than the chemical possibly could.

A direct threat to the health of millions worldwide is being hyped by the media, continuing the anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-illness agenda of environmental organizations to ban BPA, a chemical that protects against food-borne disease and increases the safe use of all plastic containers.

As it is for me, this is a serious point of contention for Caruba, who expresses his concern that a ban on BPA would “like the ban on DDT, cause millions to die.”

Caruba has extensively researched the crusade against BPA, and wrote a six-part series on his findings. If I were teaching a class on BPA it would be required reading; I highly recommend anyone check it out and throw their support behind Caruba and his efforts to call the media out on their needless — and dangerous — hype.

This is one for the fridge.

Earlier this week, Forbes published an article discussing the over-legislation of perfectly safe chemicals, like BPA. The article was written by Dr. Henry Miller, whose credits include biomedical scientist, FDA drug regulator, and currently scholar at Standford University’s Hoover Institution. In other words, the man knows his stuff.

Dr. Miller specifically looks at the current situation at the FDA, where regulators have until March 31 to respond to a petition filed by the NRDC to ban the use of BPA in food products. The FDA doesn’t have to agree with the NRDC by banning BPA (and, I’d argue, shouldn’t), but the NRDC’s actions alone have Miller worried, and I’m with him.

Viewed through the lens of food safety, the ramifications of NRDC’s legal maneuvering are worrisome. Should the NRDC succeed in its efforts, Americans who consume thousands of different canned food products every day should be at greater risk for exposure to Salmonella, Staphylococcus, botulism and other deadly food-borne contaminants.

The NRDC’s petition is just one example of how legislation, rather than scientific evidence, threatens to control the chemical landscape.

Based on the actual science, there is absolutely no reason to ban BPA. It is one of the most widely tested chemicals in the world, and no study has ever shown the chemical to be harmful to humans.

Another problem with this attempt to ban BPA in food applications is that there is no scientific basis for doing so. Not one of the more than 5,000 studies conducted on BPA worldwide has shown harm to humans of any age in normal consumer use. This was confirmed yet again in early 2011 when a group of German researchers analyzed the scientific literature; their report in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology concluded, “The available evidence indicated that BPA exposure represents no noteworthy risk to the health of the human population, including newborns and babies.”

Another glitch in the NRDC’s plan is what would happen in the FDA were to agree to the BPA ban. No suitable replacement for BPA has been presented, and without one, the risk of food-borne illness — which BPA currently protects against — could be likely to increase.

Among the many problems with the NRDC’s strategy of using litigation to advance its agenda is the fact that there is currently no good alternative to can liners made using BPA. Banning this chemical for those applications will necessarily result in the use of less tested materials to serve the same purpose or in the elimination of can liners altogether. Under the circumstances, attempts to ban BPA can liners are unconscionable.

It seems pretty clear that a ban on BPA could be disastrous, but there are some people who will never be satisfied that BPA is safe, despite what the science has proven over and over. I can’t change their minds, an expert like Dr. Miller can’t, and inarguable scientific proof can’t. I can accept that. What I can’t accept is letting these group use “thuggish tactics” to bully government regulatory agencies into banning a substance that is not only not a danger to our safety, but is, in fact, essential to it.