An important issue is how the safety of packaging and how it contributes to food safety is communicated to consumers, Dr. Cooksey points out. “We continue to compete with voices that oversimplify and blow things out of proportion to get attention, and our responses are not as swift or attention grabbing as their ‘inaccurate’ voices,” she says. “We need to continue to work on this.”
Scare Tactics
For Jonathan (Josh) Bloom, PhD, director of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences for the American Council on Science and Health, a lesson learned is that BPA is the quintessential example of scare tactics used by groups and individuals with agendas that exaggerate or even fabricate harm when none exists. “That includes an ignorant, lazy press, that can’t be bothered to challenge anything that is spoon fed to them,” he believes.
Dr. Bloom suggests the hysteria over BPA perhaps reached its apex when Nicolas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote on February 23, 2018 that he won’t touch cash register receipts because they contain a tiny amount of the chemical.
“BPA is ubiquitous,” Dr. Bloom relates. “It is used to make polycarbonate plastics which line the inside of metal cans of food, preventing air from getting in and promoting the growth of nasty things like botulism. Some BPA leaches into the food. It always has.”
The knock on BPA, Dr. Bloom says, is that its chemical structure allegedly resembles that of the structures of the sex hormones and therefore will have some kind of effect on fertility. “The phony term that is used to describe chemicals that may interact with hormone receptors is ‘endocrine disruptor,’” he points out. “This term is used ad nauseam in the junk science literature. But it’s a bunch of nonsense.”
Not only does BPA not chemically resemble the structures of the sex hormones, when it binds to estrogen receptors it does so very weakly compared to estrogen, Dr. Bloom elaborates. “Also, there is very little BPA in the blood, anyhow, because one of the jobs of our livers is detoxifying chemicals,” he notes. “BPA studies almost always measure its concentration in urine because that’s where the chemical is found, just like it should be. There are well-known mechanisms for eliminating chemicals, both natural and synthetic, and the usual route is: 1.) metabolism of the chemical to form a water-soluble metabolite and 2.) elimination in the urine. This is why BPA is found in minuscule amounts in almost everyone’s urine. It’s supposed to be there.”
Dr. Bloom says the primary reason that people are making a stink about BPA has nothing to do with the chemical. “It is because analytical techniques have become so powerful that unbelievably small amounts of almost any chemical can be detected almost anywhere,” he explains. “The BPA has been there all along. But now it’s possible to ‘see’ it.”
The “effects” of BPA on sex hormone receptors have been determined by feeding huge quantities of it to rats and looking for any difference between BPA and control groups, Dr. Bloom mentions. “What this has to do with the human situation is unclear,” he emphasizes. “People generally do not eat spoonfuls of BPA. And even if they did, it probably wouldn’t matter. The literature is littered with papers about this. And they’re just nonsense.
“There are careers, egos, and a whole lot of money that depend on BPA being ‘bad,’” Dr. Bloom says. “Yet, there are some scientists that maintain that it hasn’t been studied ‘enough.’ It is convenient and foolproof to make this argument since nothing can ever be proven to be safe.”
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