Inside Prevention

How to order pizza while kicking the can

After a long week my husband and I sometimes skip making our own dinner and call for a pizza. Our favorite is a salty-sweet combo of pepperoni and pineapple.

Just as I was picking up the phone to call for the pizza last week, I started to think about all of the cans that could likely be used on our pizza—canned tomato sauce, canned tomato paste, canned pineapple—and realized that we might have to change our pizza order if we wanted to steer clear of BPA, a chemical linked to breast cancer that's used in the lining of food cans.

What a bummer! We love ordering pizza. It's such a treat and after wrangling our 8-month-old into bed on a Friday night, the last thing I want to do is cook. But I wanted to make sure we stayed true to our pledge to kick the can this month, so I geared myself up to ask the order-taker if any canned goods go into my pies.

As I placed the call, I crossed my fingers and hoped that our local pizza place only used fresh ingredients.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. While the pineapple was fresh, canned tomatoes do go into the sauce. I called around to a couple of other places. Either they used cans or couldn't say for sure if they did or not.

It looked like we were out of luck.

Then my husband had an idea…what if we just ask for olive oil and fresh tomatoes on the pizza instead of sauce? Brilliant!

It was good (and can-free!), though I still missed my usual pizza.

Fortunately, you can find tomatoes in Tetra Paks instead of cans so I'm hoping my pizza parlor will make the switch soon—and I'll encourage it! Until then, I might try my hand at making pizza at home.

The thing is, I shouldn't have to make these calls in the first place and small businesses shouldn't have to worry about losing business because their suppliers use a toxic liner in their cans. It's time for canned food manufacturers to wake up and stop using BPA in their products. Join us in pledging to kick the can and sending a message to these companies!

Kick the can, spare the enchiladas

Summer in my house means one of my favorite seasonal dishes: fresh veggie enchiladas.

Every year, my husband and I plant zucchini and bell peppers and wait anxiously for them to ripen so that we can use them in my enchiladas. The recipe calls for refried beans which I usually buy in a can. I also tend to use canned enchilada sauce to save time since I have an 8-month-old daughter and time is at a premium these days.

But this month, I’m kicking the can—and the BPA in canned food—so making my enchiladas was going to take more planning than usual. I considered buying beans from Eden Foods, which uses BPA-free packaging for their canned beans, and enchilada sauce in a pouch but I thought it would be a fun challenge to make these items from scratch.

I began the night before by soaking black beans overnight. So far, pretty easy. I then cooked the beans on the stove and threw in some onion, salt and other spices for good measure. Piece of cake! Why did I ever buy beans from a can, I thought.

I then went to work on the enchilada sauce. I mixed my spices, made a paste as my recipe indicated and set the paste and some veggie stock on the stove to simmer and thicken. What a snap!

I was about 10 minutes into stirring the enchilada sauce and wondering about how I would do as a contestant on Top Chef when I noticed that my sauce wasn’t thickening. In fact, the paste hadn't dissolved into the stock at all! I spent 15 minutes mashing the paste and stirring trying to get it to dissolve in the liquid and thicken.

Meanwhile, the beans looked like they were finished so I drained them and mashed them in a frying pan and oil to get refried beans. But they looked dry so I tried the process over again. The second time was a little better but nowhere near as smooth as the beans from the cans.

Already I'd spent two hours in the kitchen and hadn’t even started my normal prep for the enchiladas. I chopped and sautéed the vegetables, shredded the cheese and assembled the enchiladas as fast as I could so that we could have dinner at a reasonable hour.

The result: quite good but I did notice a few things. First, I am shocked by how much salt is actually in our canned food! I added what I thought was a normal amount of salt to my beans and sauce and both were lacking in seasoning. Second, kicking the can is not something I can do every day.

The fact is, I love using canned food. It's convenient, economical and tastes good. I don’t eat much of it but whenever I buy canned food, it's because I don’t have the time or inclination to start from scratch. But I'm just not willing to expose myself and my family to unnecessary BPA for convenience or cost. After this experience, I am more convinced than ever that the market needs to change! We need cans that are safe and free of BPA.

Will I continue with this pledge? Absolutely! I may even try to make enchiladas again this month. But I know that kicking the can for the month won’t be the end of my actions. We cannot shop our way out of this problem. We need real change in the market and I plan to keep the pressure on all canned food manufacturers until they get BPA out of their products.

Join me and the Breast Cancer Fund in our campaign for BPA-free food!

"Tin" cans and cancer - Conversation with Janet Gray (KVMR-FM, 7/18/2011)

Have you kicked the can this month yet? The Breast Cancer Fund is encouraging people to skip canned foods for the month of July to send a message to manufacturers that we want BPA—a chemical linked to breast cancer—out of our food.

Our board member, author of our State of the Evidence: The Connection Between Breast Cancer and the Environment report, and Vassar College professor Dr. Janet Gray explained why we're kicking the can on KVMR radio (Nevada City) this week:

Click to listen to podcast from KVMR.

Triclosan: Is Bath & Body Works' new soap harmful to teens? (LA Times Greenspace blog, 7/18/2011)

Triclosan is an antimicrobial chemical used in many antibacterial cosmetics and other consumer products. It's also classified as a pesticide by the EPA, and it disrupts hormones (and thus is an emerging chemical of concern for breast cancer), yet it's no more effective than plain soap and water. That's why the Breast Cancer Fund's Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is targeting Bath & Body Works for the company's use of triclosan in hand soaps marketed to teens, as reported by the LA Times Greenspace blog:

Health and environmental groups have mounted a campaign against Bath & Body Works, urging the retailer to stop selling its line of “Summertime Scent” soaps that contain triclosan, a chemical categorized as a pesticide.

Scientific studies have linked triclosan to hormone disruption, which could be hazardous to teenagers whose bodies are still developing.

"A chemical like triclosan that can disrupt hormones and may affect fetal growth and development does not belong in our soap," said Lisa Archer, director of the San Francisco-based Campaign for Safe Cosmetics at the Breast Cancer Fund. "Studies show that triclosan is no more effective at preventing illness or removing germs than soap and water."

The line, which includes products with names like "Tangelo Orange Twist" and "Sugar Lemon Fizz," is marketed to teenagers using the slogan "spread love, not germs."

According to the Breast Cancer Fund, major companies, including Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal, The Body Shop, and Staples, are either no longer using the chemical or are phasing it out of products. Colgate-Palmolive has eliminated triclosan from its dishwashing liquids and Softsoap hand soaps, but continues to use the chemical in Total brand toothpaste. (Read complete post.)

Study explores chemical effects on breast tissue - and why we don't have enough of this data

Our colleagues at Silent Spring Institute have published a landmark review of the effects of mothers’ exposures to environmental chemicals on their daughters' breast development before and soon after birth.

Research into effects of common chemicals on breast development is a crucial strategy for breast cancer prevention, but one that's frequently omitted from research models. In other words, the breast often isn't studied when scientists assess the health risks of chemicals—researchers look at other tissues and systems instead. That's why only 212 chemicals have been identified as mammary carcinogens—not because other chemicals are not linked to breast cancer, but because most of the 80,000 chemicals registered for use in the United States have not been tested for their effects on the mammary gland.

The review, published in Environmental Health Perspectives in late June, brings together for the first time what we know about the effects of common chemicals on breast development.

Breast development begins in the womb and continues until a woman breastfeeds an infant. Thus, breast development spans decades. As noted in our State of the Evidence report, there are critical periods of development—such as in the womb, during puberty or during pregnancy—when breast tissue is especially vulnerable to exposures to environmental chemicals.

One of the key findings of the review is that for some chemicals, such as atrazine, bisphenol A, DDT and genistein, breasts are affected at lower doses than other tissues. In addition, these and other endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs), such as dibutyl phthalate, nonylphenol and polybrominated diphenyl ether fire retardants (PBDEs), can alter the structure of breast tissue and the timing of breast development at puberty.

The review recommends that changes in breast development be included in chemical risk assessment, and that research consider exposures during the key periods of development when breasts are most vulnerable. When 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime, the lack of breast development outcomes as part of chemical safety assessment is a clear oversight.

Addressing this oversight requires that chemicals be tested for effects on breast development before we put them into products. To this end, the National Toxicology Program and EPA need to make testing for later-life effects of prenatal and early life exposures on the breast part of their standard protocols. The California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP) has developed a model research program on breast cancer prevention, but the federal government needs to expand this, and other models of cancer prevention, into a national cancer prevention strategy.

A month of trying to kick the can

As the mom of a 10-month old, I've begun introducing solid foods over the past three months by encouraging my kid to eat anything from squash to black beans. I'll admit that, as a working mom, cutting corners is sometimes my lifeline to sanity and one of those cuts is to use canned foods instead of starting from scratch every meal.

The problem is most canned foods contain BPA, the estrogenic chemical I've been trying avoid since the birth of my son by purchasing BPA-free baby bottles, sippy cups and just about everything else. I thought I was doing so well just by ridding my house of the clear plastic containers and only purchasing glass or stainless steel bottles and cups.

My concern for my son comes from the fact that BPA has been linked to prostate cancer, obesity, cardiac disease and lowered sperm counts. On top of that, I am also concerned about the links between BPA and increased breast cancer risk for myself, my young nieces, my friends' baby girls and the little girls in my neighborhood.

I've decided to kick the can for the month of July to tell canned food companies that until they get the BPA out of their products, I’m willing to take a pass on purchasing their foods.

I’m committing to reworking the recipes and adding a little additional time to the nightly food preparation to see how easy (and hard!) it is to try to go BPA-free for the next month. Luckily, I've got an abundance of fresh produce at my fingertips to help me in this journey, but I admit I'm nervous that the amount of time this could add to my nightly schedule might make kicking the can harder than I'd like to think. How am I going to re-work that chili recipe, what about the baked beans that I always bring to our neighborhood cookout?

I know avoiding canned food for a month will impact my family's BPA levels. A study from the Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute published this spring found that when families ate fresh food—not canned or packaged in plastic—for three days, their BPA levels dropped an average of 60 percent.

More than anything, I'm committed to kicking the can in July because I want to send a strong message to canned food manufacturers that we shouldn't have to worry about chemicals in our food when we serve dinner to our families. In the long run, we can't shop our way out of this problem. We all deserve a safe and healthy future no matter where we shop, how much time we have to cook and whether we happen to know about BPA in canned foods.

I hope that you’ll follow my lead and join me in the coming month by kicking the can yourself.

P.S. Need tips on how to kick the can this month? Visit our website, which will give you simple ideas on how to replace canned foods with BPA-free alternatives.