A long history of struggle
Public health advocates like EWG and Breast Cancer Fund praise the French ban on BPA in food products, saying it will give the FDA the nudge it needs to similarly vote to protect American food and drinks from BPA.
Sonya Lunder, EWG’s Senior Research Analyst says, “FDA is the only agency with the power to protect consumers from being exposed to BPA from the food they eat…Let’s hope the agency’s upcoming decision will keep the public’s health at the forefront.”
The FDA’s decision may indeed be prompted by the French ban — which will put into jeopardy millions of dollars worth of U.S. exports of meats, juices and frozen seafood that use packaging with BPA.
But that the FDA is also put in a place where it has to make a decision on BPA because of long-term advocacy by health groups. The decision to take action is also a product of a lawsuit filed against the FDA by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in 2008.
That year, the NRDC filed a petition with the FDA, asking it to ban the use of BPA in food packaging. But when the agency ignored the petition, the NRDC was prompted to file a suit, requiring it to respond. According to the NRDC, the FDA is legally mandated to respond to written petitions within 180 days.
“Now, the FDA has agreed to give us an answer — 41 months after the petition was filed,” the NRDC’s Sarah Janssen wrote in a Dec. 2011 blog post, the Forbes reported.
Aside from that case, public health advocates and environmentalists have had many scuffles with both federal authorities and industry over bisphenol-A.
Even the Harvard School of Public Health has not been spared. After it released its report last October linking BPA exposure in pregnant women to behavioral problems in their daughters, the American Chemistry Council, a trade group with members that use BPA, denounced the study as having “significant shortcomings.”
The trade council accused the Harvard study of drawing “conclusions of unknown relevance to public health” and said the concern over BPA in children’s products was unnecessary since, it claimed, BPA is rarely used in baby bottles and sippy cups for toddlers.
But according to a report by Forbes, the statement came as a surprise given the lengths to which the group had gone to fight California and other states were working to enact legislation on BPA in children’s products.
Steven Hentges, of ACC’s polycarbonate/BPA global group had told the New York Times that his group opposed the California legislation banning BPA, as well as other similar state and federal initiatives, because “the FDA was the agency that should be making regulatory decisions, not state legislators.”
In another Harvard study, published in November 2011, researchers gave one group of volunteers canned soup for lunch and another group fresh soup. After just five days, the group eating canned soup where found to have a 1,000 percent increase in BPA in their urine. The researchers noted a significant jump in BPA levels even within hours of a single meal.
“We’ve known for a while that drinking beverages that have been stored in certain hard plastics can increase the amount of BPA in your body. This study suggests that canned foods may be an even greater concern, especially given their wide use,” warned lead author Jenny Carwile.
“The magnitude of the rise in urinary BPA we observed after just one serving of soup was unexpected and may be of concern among individuals who regularly consume foods from cans or drink several canned beverages daily,” she added.
Heart disease linked to BPA
A study published this month (March 2012) by researchers in the United Kingdom also shows that people exposed to high levels of bisphenol-A have a slightly higher risk of heart disease.
While the researchers can’t discount the contribution of other factors like weight or blood pressure in the raised heart disease risk, this is still the third study from the team to find such a link.
Compared to people without heart disease, people with heart disease were more likely to also have higher levels of BPA in their urine, lead researcher Dr. David Melzer of Peninsula Medical College in Exeter and his colleagues reported — first in 2008 and then again in 2010.
Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., affecting about one in five people over age 65.
“We’ve now shown this association in two quite separate ways, in completely different people… and at very different exposure levels,” Dr. Melzer tells Reuters Health.
Previous research found that BPA caused a variety of health problems — including heart disease — in lab animals, but whether or not the same risks exist for humans is still being tested.
The first two studies by Dr. Melzer’s team only took a snap shot in time of people’s BPA levels and whether or not they had heart disease — or specifically, clogged arteries or coronary artery disease. Because this made it hard to determine which came first — the elevated chemical levels or the heart disease, the team embarked on the new research to find this out.
The team started its latest study by taking urine samples from a large group of Britons who didn’t have heart disease. On average, this set of study participants had a BPA concentration of 1.3 nanogram per milliliter (ng/mL) in their urine — lower than the concentrations found in his earlier studies done on U.S. residents.
The researchers then tracked the participants over a decade to see who developed coronary artery disease and who didn’t. They compared the BPA levels of 758 people who ended up with heart disease with those of 861 people who remained free of heart problems.
What they found was that across study participants, an increase in BPA concentration of 4.56 ng/mL corresponded to a 13 percent greater risk of heart disease.
But the researchers admit that after accounting for factors like blood pressure, weight, exercise and social class, the link between BPA and heart disease was no longer statistically reliable. They also say the risk estimate could be inaccurate because the study used only one urine sample for a decade-long follow up.
Still, the research shows that there’s some relationship between BPA and heart disease, Dr. Melzer says, suggesting that future studies should either add or subtract BPA from people’s diets to see how it affects their health.
FDA studies
In January 2010, the FDA said that while standardized toxicity tests have “supported the safety of current low levels of human exposure to BPA,” new studies have led it to become concerned over the “potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.”
The new tests, which used “novel approaches to test for subtle effects” also attracted the concern of the National Toxicology Program at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Since then, the FDA has been conducting in-depth studies to clarify the uncertainties surrounding the risks of BPA. The studies are being conducted in cooperation with the National Toxicology Program.
The agency also said it was taking steps to reduce human exposure to BPA in the food supply, including supporting the following:
• Industry actions to stop producing BPA-containing baby bottles and infant feeding cups for the U.S. market
• The development of alternatives to BPA for the linings of infant formula cans
• Efforts to replace BPA or minimize BPA levels in other food can linings
• A shift to a more robust regulatory framework for oversight of BPA
• Recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services for infant feeding and food preparation to reduce exposure to BPA
The FDA said it was also seeking further public comment and external input on the science surrounding BPA.
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Bisphenol-A Toxicity: Campbell’s Soup, French Ban, FDA Health Studies. Posted 15 March 2012.