"BPA" news and stories

Every time you go to the grocery store, you probably spend some amount of time thinking about whether the food you're buying is good for you, but how much time do you spend pondering whether the food's packaging is good for you?

According to a recent report by ABC News, maybe you should.

At issue is the presence of certain chemical compounds that are used to manufacture plastic and other food packaging. A study by the Breast Cancer Fund and the Silent Spring Institute, an environmental group, found that when participants were restricted to a fresh-food diet for three days (meaning no packaged foods), the amount of these chemicals detected in their urine dropped dramatically, by up to 66 percent.

Bisphenol-A (or BPA), a chemical present in certain plastics, is an endocrine disruptor that has been linked to heart disease, cancer, and endocrine disorders, including diabetes and obesity. With all the scary news about bisphenol A in canned food that's coming out right now, we were left wondering, well, what IS safe to eat these days?

Experts have some general tips about how to ensure the safest, healthiest food supply for our families. According to the Environmental Working Group, it may not be possible to completely eliminate BPA from our lives, but we can take simple steps to minimize its presence.

First, and perhaps most obvious: Look for containers that claim to be BPA-free. The Soft Landing, a blog devoted to avoiding endocrine disruptors, listed several brands that use BPA-free cans for at least some of their products, including Eden Foods, Trader Joe's, and Native Forest.

First it was baby products, then reusable drinking bottles. Now a new report released last week by the National Workgroup for Safe Markets, a coalition of more than 17 public and environmental health groups, shows that bisphenol-A is present in most food preserved in cans (not just in the lining of the cans themselves, where it is used to protect food from corrosion and bacteria). BPA, as the chemical is also called, has been linked to a range of ills including cancer, infertility, and obesity.

For the new study (charmingly titled "No Silver Lining"), researchers analyzed 50 cans of food from 19 U.S. states and Ontario, Canada. BPA was found in a whopping 92 percent of the collected samples, with the top level being the highest yet reported in the U.S. -- 1,140 parts per billion. (In case you're keeping track, it was a can of Del Monte French Style Green Beans, and it came from Wisconsin.)

In the past, some have argued that while BPA is certainly present in a variety of plastics, the amount that actually leaches into our food is negligible. Not so here. Mike Schade, a co-author of the study, told AOL News that "real-life meals involving one or more cans of food can cause an individual to ingest levels of BPA that have been shown to cause health effects in laboratory animal studies."

While the jury is still out on whether BPA -- Bisphenol A, a chemical used in many plastics that may cause health problems -- is safe in food packaging, some manufacturers are looking for alternatives.

But finding BPA-free cans isn't exactly an easy job, as several food manufacturers have discovered, reported the Washington Post. BPA is used as the lining of nearly every can on supermarket shelves, and even if food is canned in BPA-free materials, some of its ingredients may have encountered the chemical.