Inside Prevention

Will Your Canned Soup Carry a Warning Label? (Rodale, 4/12/2013)

A Rodale article about California’s declaration that BPA would be added to the state’s list of Prop 65 chemicals quotes our policy manager, Gretchen Lee Salter:

“The Prop 65 listing is yet another indictment of this toxic chemical that industry continues to argue is safe, despite waves of peer-reviewed scientific studies finding that BPA harms reproduction and is linked to breast cancer," says Gretchen Lee Salter, policy manager at the Breast Cancer Fund. "And the listing is happening the same week that the French government began warning pregnant women to avoid BPA because fetal exposure has been linked to later-life breast cancer. This is a seriously toxic chemical that none of us should be exposed to." Read the full article here.

Proposition 65 requires the governor of California to publish, at least annually, a list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. The law also requires labeling of  products that contain high levels of these chemicals, but because BPA can exert negative effects at extremely low levels, environmental health advocates and state officials are still hashing out acceptable levels for labeling.  For more information on the health effects of BPA, check out our recently updated State of the Evidence on BPA.

Phthalates and BPA make an unexpected appearance

A new dietary intervention study suggests that an individual may not be able to avoid food packaging chemicals like phthalates (plastic softeners) and BPA (found in canned foods and older hard plastic containers) by cutting out canned and plastic-wrapped foods because these chemicals can—and do—enter the food during processing.

Researchers from the University of Washington replicated the 2011 Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute dietary intervention study and found DEHP (a phthalate used in food packaging) levels increased 24-fold during the intervention.

The researchers were puzzled by this finding—our study found phthalate and BPA levels declined during the intervention diet—so they followed up by testing spices and dairy used in the intervention diet. They found high levels of DEHP in spices like coriander, cinnamon and cayenne pepper, as well as in dairy products.

The researchers also found modest increases in BPA during the intervention. This finding may be due to a study population who already ate mostly fresh foods—in fact, only three of the 10 families who participated indicated eating canned foods.

These findings underscore the need for federal reform of food contact laws that can ensure chemicals linked to hormone disruption don't end up in our food supply. The FDA has the authority to regulate chemicals our food touches at all points in the process from field to table: from the type of plastic tubing used in milking equipment, to the containers spices are held in before being divvied up in store-shelf sizes, to the plastic wrap on supermarket cheese.

Our role is to see that the FDA actually uses this power to protect our health.

For more on this study, check out Fast Company (You’re Eating Toxic Chemicals, Even If You Eat Organic And Avoid Plastic) and the NRDC blog (What's for lunch? Likely a few hormone-disrupting chemicals - phthalates and BPA).

Eat like a Mennonite (New York Times, 1/18/2013)

What does it take for a modern American family to lower its BPA levels? Author Florence Williams offers a peek into her stint in the nearly-plastic-free world in an opinion piece for the New York Times:

On the second day of my chemical-detox diet, I was very hungry. I’d been eating like a rabbit, all carrots and greens that I’d gathered, barehanded, from the baskets of the farmer’s market, no gloves or plastic bags allowed. I cooked up some quinoa that I bought packaged in paper from the supermarket sometimes known as Whole Paycheck. I was effectively a vegan because I couldn’t find meat or cheese that wasn’t wrapped in plastic, and I didn’t have access to accommodating livestock.

My 7-year-old daughter and I were participating in a pilot study conducted in 2011 by the Silent Spring Institute and the Breast Cancer Fund (a follow-up study was published later that year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives). We had urinated into some glass containers a few weeks earlier, back when we were "normal" Americans, and now we were spending three days trying to reduce our exposure to plastics before supplying our urine again.

As Williams notes, the "normal" phase of the study, which allowed for painted toenails and canned beans, was more fun. Yet it's possible to create modern conveniences that don't leave toxic traces in their human consumers.

Says Williams, "It's why we need the government to require testing of commercial chemicals for hormonal effects, and to regulate them in a meaningful way. And it's why we need manufacturers to design products with safer substances in the first place." (Read complete article.)

Now undeniable: Breast cancer that comes with the job (Huffington Post, 11/26/2012)

Our own Jeanne Rizzo published her thoughts about the recent Canadian factory worker study on Huffington Post yesterday. Now we have evidence that women who are exposed to hormone-disrupting chemicals in food canning and plastics factories have a sharply higher risk of breast cancer—so what will we do about it? And who will act on behalf of these women?

Unfortunately for these women workers and for all of us (for we too are exposed to some of these chemicals on a daily basis), many industry and government leaders refuse to act based on biological plausibility. Instead, they prefer plausible deniability, saying we need more and more and more evidence—incontrovertible truth, in fact—before we take action. (Read complete article.)

Related articles

Can certain jobs cause breast cancer? A new study suggests yes (The Daily Beast, 11/21/2012)

Jeanne Rizzo: Now Undeniable: Breast Cancer That Comes With the Job

Study spotlights high breast cancer risk for plastics workers (Center for Public Integrity, 11/19/2012)

Can certain jobs cause breast cancer? A new study suggests yes (The Daily Beast, 11/21/2012)

Florence Williams, author of the acclaimed book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, spoke with Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo for a piece on The Daily Beast describing a new Canadian study.

The study authors found a higher risk of premenopausal breast cancer among women working in factories that make canned foods and plastic parts for automobiles:

Both the automotive and canning industries are known to use chemicals that affect hormone systems in lab animals, such as BPA, phthalates, and flame-retardants. Phthalates, which are used to make plastic malleable for molding car interiors, have been associated with lower sperm counts in men. BPA, used in the lining of food cans, has been banned from some products in Canada.

“The U.S. has not conducted this kind of workplace study,” said Jeanne Rizzo, president of the Breast Cancer Fund, a California-based nonprofit. “Federal agencies should immediately look into similar occupations in this country and take this seriously.” (Read complete article.)

Study spotlights high breast cancer risk for plastics workers (Center for Public Integrity, 11/19/2012)

Researchers have found a fivefold increase in breast cancer risk for pre-menopausal women who worked in factories that make food cans or plastic automotive parts, as compared to a control group from the same industrial community. In the course of their work, these women were likely exposed to carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals like BPA, phthalates and flame retardants.

The study was published today in the journal Environmental Health; the Center for Public Integrity interviewed Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo for an in-depth story also out today: 

“These workplace chemicals are now present in our air, water, food and consumer products,” said one of the two principal investigators, James Brophy, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Windsor and a former occupational health clinic director. “If we fail to take heed then we are doing so at our own peril.”

Jeanne Rizzo, president of the Breast Cancer Fund, a San Francisco-based group that has pressed for more research into environmental causes of a disease that claimed nearly 40,000 lives in the United States last year, called the Windsor study “a very powerful piece of work. The piece that’s really been missing for female breast cancer is occupation.” (Read complete article.)

This is big news—and a call to action for industries and governments to do more to protect workers from toxic chemicals.

FDA bans BPA in baby bottles -- but what does it really mean?

Too little, too late is how Janet Nudelman, the Breast Cancer Fund's Director of Program and Policy, characterizes the FDA's decision to ban BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups. The ban, announced today, will have little impact on the market, which has already turned away from BPA in children's products.

[G]iven that Canada, the European Union, China, and at least five other countries as well as 11 U.S. states have prohibited the use of BPA in children’s products, that every major baby bottle manufacturer has already stopped using the chemical, and that BPA is also found in canned food linings, some infant formula containers and other food packaging, this action is too little, too late.

...

Now the FDA needs to catch up. The FDA needs to take decisive action to ensure that all of us are protected from this toxic chemical.

Read Janet's complete statement and learn more about BPA and breast cancer.

Styrene industry gets Congress’ ear on cancer listing, and we all lose

Today, the National Toxicology Program’s (NTP) crucial Report on Carcinogens is on trial in Congress and the scientists who decided—based on scientific evidence—to list styrene as a reasonably anticipated human carcinogen are being called to defend their work in the face of industry accusations that the listing hurts jobs.

In truth, of course, chemicals linked to cancer hurt our health and the health of workers exposed to them.

Within days of the NTP’s June 2011 decision to list the chemical styrene, trade groups representing the styrene industry attacked the report. In fact, they fought for years to keep styrene out of the report altogether.

Now chemical industry representatives, including a Dow Chemical exec, have pushed themselves in front of lawmakers as part of a Congressional hearing entitled How the Report on Carcinogens Uses Science to Meet its Statutory Obligations, and its Impact on Small Business Jobs.

The Report on Carcinogens was mandated by Congress in 1978. It reviews the peer-reviewed science testing chemicals’ effects on inducing or promoting cancer, and then lists the appropriate chemicals as known human carcinogens or reasonably anticipated human carcinogens. Chemicals that are not suspected carcinogens are not listed in the report.

The NTP and the Report on Carcinogens provides us with robust and thorough evaluations of carcinogens carried out by an objective scientific agency. The report provides essential public health information that can help consumers make informed decisions and support advocacy efforts to reduce exposures to carcinogens.

The Breast Cancer Fund and many of our colleagues have written letters to encourage Congressional support for the NTP and the Report on Carcinogens so that we continue to have rigorously evaluated evidence to help inform our advocacy and educational efforts.

You can watch the hearing live online [the recording will also be available at this link]. Our eyes and voices are critical to keeping the scientific process free of political and economic influence.

If the food's in plastic, what's in the food? (Washington Post, 4/16/2012)

A new article in the Washington Post about chemicals used in food packaging leads with a study published by the Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute that demonstrated a significant dip in families' BPA and phthalate levels when they cut packaged food from their diets for just a few days. How common are these chemicals and what can be done to protect people from exposure?:

[S]cientists are beginning to piece together data about the ubiquity of chemicals in the food supply and the cumulative impact of chemicals at minute doses. What they’re finding has some health advocates worried.

This is “a huge issue, and no [regulator] is paying attention,” says Janet Nudelman, program and policy director at the Breast Cancer Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on the environmental causes of the disease. “It doesn’t make sense to regulate the safety of food and then put the food in an unsafe package.”

How common are these chemicals? Researchers have found traces of styrene, a likely carcinogen, in instant noodles sold in polystyrene cups. They’ve detected nonylphenol — an estrogen-mimicking chemical produced by the breakdown of antioxidants used in plastics — in apple juice and baby formula. They’ve found traces of other hormone-disrupting chemicals in various foods: fire retardants in butter, Teflon components in microwave popcorn, and dibutyltin — a heat stabilizer for polyvinyl chloride — in beer, margarine, mayonnaise, processed cheese and wine. They’ve found unidentified estrogenic substances leaching from plastic water bottles. (Read complete article.)

Learn more about chemicals linked to breast cancer that are found in food and food packaging.

Pressure increases on FDA to ban BPA from food packaging

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration must be feeling the pressure to do something about BPA pretty intensely right now. And right it should. As we wait for the agency to meet its March 31 deadline to respond to a petition by the Natural Resources Defense Fund to ban this toxic chemical linked to breast cancer from food packaging, today Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., added his own petitions to the FDA asking for a similar ban. This is the first time a member of Congress has used the FDA’s citizen petition process to pressure the FDA to take regulatory action, signaling a growing frustration on the part of policymakers and the public alike with the FDA’s failure to act on this critical public health issue.

The FDA’s inaction is in stark contrast to consumer and industry action. Last week, the Breast Cancer Fund’s Cans Not Cancer campaign publicized the fact that Campbell Soup Company will phase out the use of BPA in its can linings. Baby bottle and sports water bottle manufacturers abandoned BPA over the last few years. At the public policy level, 11 states have banned BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups, and three of those states have also banned it from infant formula and baby food.

The Breast Cancer Fund submitted a letter of support for Markey’s petitions, signed by organizations representing millions of concerned citizens who are saying loud and clear that it’s time the FDA get BPA out of all food packaging.

And you can make your voice heard today: tell the FDA to declare BPA in food packaging unsafe once and for all.