Some Bisphenol A With Your Green Beans?

Nine out of ten. According to a study released today, those are your chances of having some bisphenol A (BPA) with tonight’s dinner, if canned food is on your menu. New testing for BPA sampled 50 cans of food and drinks, and found that the hormone-disrupting chemical is a near ubiquitous presence in canned food.

The study, titled No Silver Lining and published by the National Work Group for Safe Markets, found what appears to be the highest level of BPA ever detected in canned food. A can of DelMonte green beans from a Wisconsin pantry clocked in at 1140 parts per billion BPA, several times greater than the highest levels reported by other recent studies.

Dr. Laura Vandenberg, a leading BPA researcher at Tufts University,  reviewed the results.

BPA turns up in canned food because it is a component of the epoxy lining used in most cans in the United States. But it’s not the only option: Eden Foods has used an alternative for most of its cans for several years, and General Mills recently announced that its cans of Muir Glen tomatoes will soon be BPA-free.

While public attention has focused on the use of BPA in baby bottles, its presence in canned food is potentially even more troubling. Research on BPA indicates children’s period of greatest vulnerability comes before they are using baby bottles—it’s before they’re born. And if their moms are exposed to BPA during pregnancy, the chemical travels to the fetus where it can disrupt development in a number of ways.

To calculate how much BPA we are actually ingesting from canned food, the study authors created hypothetical menus and added up the dose based on the study results. They found that an averaged-sized woman who consumed any of the three sample menus would be exposed to BPA at higher levels than those that caused reproductive problems and increased chances of breast cancer in laboratory studies.

Given the lack of any margin of safety with BPA exposures just from this one source—canned food—advocates are calling for immediate action to replace BPA in can linings with safer materials. Nationally, the Senate is expected to vote soon on the Food Safety Modernization Act, which could include a phaseout of BPA in food and drink containers.

The Safe Chemicals Act, recently introduced in Congress, could have broader impact on BPA and other chemicals that disrupt hormones, harm the nervous or reproductive system, or cause cancer. We’re looking for Congress to strengthen the Act to make sure that it includes strict timelines for reducing the use of such chemicals. Maybe hormone disruptors and cancer-causing chemicals won’t be on the dinner menu in 2012.