What the chemical industry does not want the consumer, that is you, to know about everyday products
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The global chemical industry annually produces about 6 billion pounds of bisphenol A (BPA), an integral component of a vast array of plastic products, generating at least $6 billion in annual sales. The value of BPA-based manufactured goods is probably incalculable. Studies by the Environmental Working Group have found BPA in more than half the canned foods and beverages sampled from supermarkets across the United States.
Soon after scientists Frederick Vom Saal and Wade Welshons found the first hard evidence that miniscule amounts of BPA caused irreversible changes in the prostates of fetal mice, a scientist from Dow Chemical Company showed up at the Missouri lab. He disputed the data and declared, as Vom Saal recalls, "We want you to know how distressed we are by your research."
"It was not a subtle threat," Vom Saal says. "It was really, really clear, and we ended up saying, threatening us is really not a good idea."
The Missouri scientists redoubled their investigations of BPA. Industry officials and scientist allies fired back, sometimes in nose-to-nose debates at scientific gatherings, sometimes more insidiously. "I heard chemical industry officials were making blatantly false statements about our research," says Welshons. "They were skilled at creating doubt when none existed."
The ever increasingly noisy denials of the industry backfired.
By the turn of the millennium, dozens of scientists were launching their own investigations of the chemical. But the chemical industry can be expected to fight aggressively against more regulation. Earlier this year, the industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat a California legislative proposal to ban BPA in food packaging.
The Chemistry Council and allied companies and industry groups hired an army of lobbyists. Their tactics included an industry email to food banks claiming that a BPA ban would mean the end of distributions of canned goods for the poor. This was another one of those ploys that was working against the scientists that upset the applecart of the chemical industry.
Plastic bottles that are made of polycarbonate that contained but traces of BPA have been entirely banned in places such as Canada and so, so I understand, EU member states. In the USA, however, the FDA and other agencies, wholly owned, as it would seem, by the chemical industry, deny that there is any evidence of risk to health. This regardless of the measures taken by other nations and agencies.
BPA is, as mentioned here, not just found in, as is often assumed, plastic water bottles and baby bottles and other polycarbonate and PET products but also and especially in the lining of tin cans that contain foods or beverages, primarily such that are acidic in one way or the other.
If you would look closely the foods that come in lined tins, amongst others, are all the baby foods, with the exception of those that come in glass jars, and the chances are that most of those tins contain BPA in the lining. Oh dear! Just where we would think it should be avoided completely but, alas, this does not seem to be so.
© 2009
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What the chemical industry does not want us to know
