Though it has dropped from the headlines recently, the bisphenol A discussion continues to rage. California is one Jerry Brown signature away from a partial ban of the chemical, which is used in everything from canned goods to PVC plastic to cash register receipts. There is ample evidence that BPA, an endocrine disruptor, has been linked to various ills, including diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Some scientists are even raising questions about the damage it’s doing to our oceans.

And, despite FDA footdragging on the issue, the government is worried. The National Institutes of Health recently initiated a $30 million research program (though not without some controversy) to examine the growing risks and make a final call on BPA’s safety.

Now, a new study by U.S. government scientists purports to debunk the entire BPA threat. It claims that BPA poses no risk whatsoever and goes so far as to conclude that every previous study that found otherwise was fundamentally flawed.

If true, that would be great news. Getting BPA off the toxic chemical list would make everyone’s life a whole lot easier. So I contacted experts in BPA research to see if this study was all it was cracked up to be. Their answer: No way. They expressed serious concerns, if not outrage, over the study’s broad conclusions and went so far as to question its validity.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Toxicological Sciences, was performed by toxicologists from several government agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Center for Toxicological Research. It involved feeding a group of 20 subjects canned food three times a day in a laboratory setting and then measuring the levels of BPA in their blood and urine.

When all was said and done, the scientists claimed to find “undetectable” levels of the endocrine disrupting chemical in the bloodstreams or urine of their subjects. It claims to debunk  previous studies that have detected low levels of BPA in human blood or urine. And it says the risk from BPA to pregnant women and their fetuses is likely non-existent, despite the fact that no pregnant women (and thus, no fetuses) were involved.

Interestingly, this study was not part of the NIH BPA research program. It was done independently and funded by an EPA grant, according to its lead author, Dr. Justin Teeguarden, a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. For the record, Teeguarden’s previous work focused on nanotechnology and, as far as I can tell, this is his first published work on BPA.

Being new to BPA research did not stop Teeguarden from telling a Forbes columnist:

In a nutshell we can now say for the adult human population exposed to even very high dietary levels, blood concentrations of the bioactive form of BPA throughout the day are below our ability to detect them, and orders of magnitude lower than those causing effects in rodent exposed to BPA.

That is quite a statement. Indeed, the broadness of Teeguarden’s claims, as well as several of the study’s techniques, have caused serious consternation among other scientists.

Dr. Laura Vandenberg, author of a definitive peer-reviewed survey of BPA research, said that the work, is “interesting,” but has major shortcomings. The first thing that caught her attention was the fact that the researchers didn’t test the BPA levels in the food given to study participants. BPA may be, as the study declares, “ubiquitous” but it’s also well-known that BPA levels vary greatly from brand to brand and even from can to can. Given those facts, said Vandenberg, “they made tremendous assumptions … I can’t see how you can conclude that all previous studies” were invalid based on this one investigation.

Vandenberg went on to say that it’s impossible to “ignore dozens and dozens of blood studies and 80 biomonitoring studies” that have consistently found detectable BPA levels in human blood and urine. Nor does she feel comfortable blaming others’ positive results on “contamination,” as the team led by Teeguarden does.

In fact, when I spoke to Dr. Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, he pointed out  that this study did find detectable BPA levels in three subjects, but for reasons that are not well explained, they were excluded.

Another mystifying element of this paper involves water–and lots of it. The study participants drank 3.5 liters of water each day of the study. That’s about three and half times the amount most people drink in a day, Hansen explained. And while most BPA research uses methods to account for dilution caused by water, this study did not.

To conduct the research, Teeguarden applied what are called “toxicokinetic” techniques, which involve examining exactly how a chemical breaks down in the bloodstream and precisely what happens as it interacts with the human body. While that sounds like a helpful way to approach BPA, Vandenberg believes that there are significant problems with relying on toxicokinetic techniques to analyze BPA exposure. In fact, she has written extensively about those problems. She concludes, in essence, that both the current toxicokinetic tools as well as the scientific understanding of BPA are limited enough that these techniques alone could lead a researcher down the wrong path.

Another odd feature of this study that caught Vandenberg’s attention was that, for key citations regarding how the body handles BPA and how much BPA people consume, the study relied on industry-funded work that many scientists consider to be flawed. Vandenberg couldn’t come up with a reason why Teeguarden would do this.

For his part, Teeguarden vigorously defended his work to me in an email. As for his use of toxicokinetics, he said:

If it is so problematic, why has it been identified as so important and why are so many people working on it? …The truth is, without the information we obtain from measuring BPA in the blood of animals and humans, we have no basis for assessing hazard in the human population.

This is undoubtedly true. However, scientists who have applied this technique to BPA say that it simply can’t yet do the “heavy lifting” Teeguarden is asking of it. Teeguarden has, if not misused it, at least stretched it beyond its current capabilities.

Despite Teeguarden’s abundant confidence, there is nothing clear cut about his research. In fact, several leading BPA researchers have penned a highly critical dissection of Teeguarden’s study–including a rejection of its approach, its choice of sources, and its validity–that has been accepted for publication by the journal that published the study in the first place.

If you’ve made it this far–despite the total absence of puppies–and are wondering why I’ve devoted so much space to this issue, it’s due to this latest work’s pedigree. A government-funded study performed by government scientists in government labs and involving the DOE, the CDC and the NCTR is bound to get a lot more attention than a smaller academic study, especially given its dramatic conclusions. Even so, the study provides little for industry to sink its teeth into–though the tin can lobby is surely trying.

This is not the only recent work on BPA that’s raising eyebrows among independent scientists. Research out of China published in Annals of Internal Medicine claiming to find no conclusive link between BPA and diabetes is also under fire. As Reuters reports, the study did find that those with higher levels of BPA exposure were more likely to have diabetes, but the authors simply dismissed the connection.

Meanwhile, research on the dangers of BPA continues to come out as well. Scientists recently found evidence that BPA (as well as the preservative methlyparaben) can, as hormone disruptors, interfere with breast cancer drugs (via SF Gate). That might partially explain why industry is so desperate to find evidence that BPA is not at detectable levels in human blood.

The fact is that, like Agent Mulder, I too want to believe; if BPA was completely harmless we could all go find other things to worry about. And while any scientist can stand up and claim that it’s safe, there are still quite a few of them telling us loud and clear that it’s not.

Originally published on Grist

BPA has been linked to fertility problems, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, attention deficit disorder and cancer. Scientists at the University of Missouri, led by Cheryl Rosenfeld, found that a constant stream of BPA into the body could result in the chemical sticking around longer than expected.

“When BPA is taken through the food, the active form may remain in the body for a longer period of time than when it is provided through a single treatment, which does not reflect the continuous exposure that occurs in animal and human populations,” Rosenfeld said. “We need to study this further to determine where the ingested BPA becomes concentrated and subsequently released back into the bloodstream to be distributed throughout the body.”

She also considered that the consequences of this could be even more dire:

We know that the active form of BPA binds to our steroid receptors, meaning it can affect estrogen, thyroid and testosterone function. It might also cause genetic mutations. Thus, this chemical can hinder our ability to reproduce and possibly cause behavioral abnormalities that we are just beginning to understand.

BPA is commonly used in the lining of canned food, in plastic bottles, and on cash register receipts, among other applications. The Centers for Disease Control has shown that it is also in the urine of 93 percent of Americans.

I reported a few weeks ago that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently affirmed that BPA in cans leaches into different foods at variable, erratic rates. Another study out this week showed that 95 percent of the BPA in preschoolers’ urine had been taken in through their food sources. This backs up the 2010 report [PDF] by the World Health Organization (WHO) stating that food was by far the primary source of exposure to BPA in humans.

In addition to media coverage on this study, Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine published by the American Chemical Society, has made BPA the focus of this week’s issue.

One article looks closely at the toxicity debate. The growing consensus among consumers is that they don’t want it in their food at any dose, and health advocates point to many of the low-dose studies that increasingly show reason for concern. Meanwhile, the industry–which is producing 12 billion pounds of the chemical every year, with demand rising by five percent annually–doesn’t want to lose their billion-dollar market. The article states that can liner and baby bottle applications represent about five percent of BPA use–meaning that it might make better sense for advocates to organize for partial bans, like the nine states which have made moves to ban the substance in baby bottles.

However, this doesn’t rid us of channels for BPA exposure. In addition to human exposure via other types of food packaging, cashiers who handle receipts and the workers in facilities that use and produce BPA are still at high risk for exposure and illness. The industry also claims it has yet to find truly suitable alternatives. In addition, those that are in use now–like Bisphenol-S–are not necessarily any better for us. Indeed, most of them are also endocrine disruptors with the potential to cause the same set of diseases.

This may leave you wondering what to do to avoid ingesting BPA. One way to minimize your exposure is through a diet of fresh, whole foods, including fruits and vegetables, which has been proven to dramatically decrease the amount of BPA in the bloodstream.

In the meantime, California stands on the edge of voting to pass a BPA ban in the next week. Last month, the State Assembly passed a bill to ban BPA and in the next week, the bill is expected to be heard by the Senate Health Committee, chaired by Dr. Edward P. Hernandez (D-Los Angeles), who abstained from voting on a similar bill that was defeated last session. Based on the overwhelming evidence, let’s hope California makes the right decision this time around.

The Senate made substantial progress on the pending Food Safety Bill Wednesday. To move the sweeping food bill forward, the upper chamber voted 74-25 to limit debate, circumventing Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) objection.  And key stakeholders resolved the two controversial issues that have plagued the bill: bisphenol A and small farm exemptions.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) amendment–which originally aimed to ban the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, in all food containers, but had since been scaled back to only containers meant for infants and small children–was officially defeated.

“Unfortunately, the compromise agreement on a BPA amendment to the food safety bill has been blocked,” announced Feinstein on the floor of the Senate. Feinstein said she and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) had, after months of negotiation, finally reached a compromise that would have banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups and required the FDA to issue a revised safety assessment on BPA by Dec. 1, 2012.

That compromise was shut down by the leading chemical industry group, according to Feinstein.  ”Unfortunately it has become clear that the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has blocked and obstructed the agreement from being added to the Food Safety Bill currently on the floor.”

“I regret that the ACC puts the sale of chemicals above the safety of infants and children,” she added. “The chemical lobby came in at the 11th hour opposing this ban.”

The ACC has maintained it should be up to the Food and Drug Administration, not Congress, to rule on BPA safety.

The Tester-Hagan Amendment, on the other hand, remains a real possibility. The amendment, introduced by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) and supported by Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC), would exempt farms and food producers that either fit the FDA’s definition of “very small business,” sell most of their products directly to consumers, restaurants, or retailers within state lines or within 400 miles that have annual sales of less than half a million dollars.

Late last night, consumer groups and sustainable agriculture advocates, who have been at odds over the amendment’s language for months, reached a compromise that could be adopted into the manager’s package. Though the details are not yet public, the agreement is rumored to reduce the distance threshold and allow the FDA the ability to withdraw an exemption if a farm or facility is linked to a foodborne illness outbreak.

“We are happy with the outline of the final deal on the Tester-Hagan amendment,” Ferd Hoefner policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said, adding that specifics of the deal were embargoed.

On Friday, leaders from the House of Representatives and the Senate introduced legislation to establish a federal ban on bisphenol A (BPA) in all food and beverage containers. The bills, which are identical, are sponsored by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

BPA—a chemical found in the linings of cans and in polycarbonate plastic, including some sports bottles, food-storage containers and baby bottles—has potential links to a wide range of health effects. The diseases and health effects to which BPA has been linked include an increased risk of diseases or disorders of the brain, reproductive and immune systems.

“The scientific evidence is mounting that BPA poses serious health risks, especially to children, and manufacturers and retailers have already started to pull items from their store shelves,” said Markey, reported Agence France-Presse. “It is time for Congress to act quickly to ban this toxin from all food and beverage containers so that parents can feed their children without worrying that the food contains poisonous chemicals.”

The federal legislation follows the March 3 unanimous decision by the Suffolk County, New York Legislature to ban BPA in all beverage containers for children under the age of three. Today, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy will hold a public hearing on this landmark legislation. Levy has until April 2 to either sign or veto the bill to sign the bill to make Suffolk County the first jurisdiction in the nation to effectively ban BPA.

“This legislation will set a new precedent and sends a strong message to FDA and to industry that consumers, like those in Suffolk County, want change now,” said Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Senior Scientist and Policy Analyst, Consumers Union.

Consumers Union has repeatedly called on FDA to ban BPA materials in infant and children’s products and food and beverage contact containers. Recent studies have linked BPA exposure to problems with liver function testing, an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease and interruptions in chemotherapy treatment. A study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has shown that 93% of Americans excrete some BPA in their urine. New studies also show that BPA seems to stay in the body longer than previously believed.

In August 2008, the federal agency said BPA was safe for humans. But the agency only considered studies that had been financed by the plastics industry. At last month’s Science Board Hearing, FDA tacitly acknowledged the serious health concerns regarding BPA, but the agency continues to maintain the position that no public health safeguards should be implemented at this time.

Steven Stern, the Suffolk County legislator who sponsored the ban in that county, told the Associated Press that the FDA review prompted him to act. “We can’t wait. We don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

Several states, such as Oregon, Washington and California, and cities, such as Chicago, are also considering BPA bans as the FDA continues to research BPA while allowing the product to remain on the market. In 2008, the Canadian government banned its use in baby bottles. Major U.S. retailers, including Toys ‘R’ Us Inc. and Wal-Mart, already have removed products containing BPA from their shelves because of the growing controversy.

Shortly after the Suffolk County Legislature made its decision, six of the largest manufacturers of baby bottles—Avent, Disney First Years, Gerber, Dr. Brown, Playtex and Evenflow—decided they will no longer sell bottles made with BPA. The decision by manufacturers came after Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, joined by attorneys general of Delaware and New Jersey, wrote to the baby bottle companies urging them to stop using BPA because studies have linked the chemical to health problems in infants, including damage to reproductive, neurological and immune systems.

Almost immediately after this decision, gas and chemical giant Sunoco, acknowledging the safety concerns about BPA, announced they would restrict the sales of the controversial chemical in baby bottles and food containers for children under three. “We will no longer sell BPA to [Sunoco’s] customers who cannot make this promise,” Thomas Golembeski, head of public relations, wrote in a letter to two investors, according to the Associated Press.

While scientists continue to assess the health risks of BPA to consumers, the FDA is taking on a bigger risk by taking no action to protect the health and safety of consumers. Given the currently existing body of scientific knowledge about the health risks of BPA to consumers—and the growing consumer and industry movement again this chemical—the FDA should act immediately to protect high risk populations, such as children and babies, while it gathers more data.

Image: thesoftlanding