Can Your Canned Food
You’ve transitioned to BPA-free baby bottles and water bottles. But did you know that canned food liners also contain BPA? Last year, Globe and Mail tests of canned food revealed disconcerting results: BPA concentrations in tomato sauce were 18.2 parts per billion, 6.2 ppb in kid’s ravoli, and 14.1 ppb in tomato juice. These numbers may not seem high, but scientists are concerned that concentrations of even 1/2 part per trillion may be enough for this estrogen-like chemical to disrupt our endocrine system–the effects of which are not pretty. BPA exposure has been linked to many different diseases including breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease (to name just a few). And scientists continue to discover more health impacts all the time .
What is a consumer to do? As a green lifestyle consultant my advice (and my own practice) is to choose fresh, dried, and frozen food over canned food (for example, I soak my own beans whenever I can). When I do need to buy preserved food, I either choose canned food from Eden Foods and Trader Joes, which use BPA-free can liners or I choose food preserved in glass jars (although food preserved in glass jars may also be tainted with BPA that has migrated from their metal lids, albeit at much lower levels).
Clearly we consumers will not be able to solve this problem by simply “voting with our pocketbooks”–although this is certainly an important and powerful tool. We need our government to at the very least regulate BPA, and ideally ban it (which Japan has done) rather than continue to regurgitate industry greenwashing (click here to read the FDA’s position on BPA).
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