If it's not one thing it's another when it comes to packaged food and drink these days. If it's it not what they are using to improve the flavour that will make you sick (monosodium glutamate or M.S.G. as its more commonly known) it's what has been used to give it extra weight. The food industry has take to bulking up frozen packaged foods with soy protein.
Thankfully people are starting to catch on, including the food regulators. So instead of the old warning labels on packages, with only peanuts as a potential allergen, the list now includes soy, wheat gluten, and sulphates. People with food allergies are used to having to read any item's label in order to ensure their safety and well-being.
Well now instead of having to just worry about what is being put in our food being dangerous to our health, we may have to start worrying about what our food is being packaged in being a danger. Bisphenol A is a chemical known to act like a synthetic female sex hormone used in the manufacture of plastics and tin to prevent the taste of the container from being transferred to the food or liquid its holding. The only problem is that far too many test results are revealing something is not right with this wonder chemical.
In fact what scares scientists the most is that it seems the lower the amount of chemical present, the greater the danger. This has to do with the way hormones interact with our bodies. Hormones latch onto cells and at low doses stimulate vital biological processes. At too high a dose the cell's receptors are overwhelmed and shut down. This of course turns the theories of toxicity that state that the higher the dose the worse off you are on their head.
How bad is it? Well a geneticist at Washington State University, Dr. Patricia Hunt, was so appalled by her findings that she immediately went home and threw out all her products containing Bisphenol A. She had found that female mice exposed to low levels of the chemical had the unfertilized eggs in their uteruses so scrambled that if they had been humans the result would have been birth defects such as Down syndrome and miscarriages.
It's only been in recent years that the chemical has become widely used, even though we've known about its existence since the 1930s, and started using it in the 1950s. But we live in an increasingly pre packaged age so there is more call for this type of product then before – who wants to taste plastic in their food and drinks? Usually a product containing Bisphenol A is marked with the recycling number 7 inside a triangle. (Interestingly enough that's one of the plastics my local recycling company won't take)
Article comments
1 - A person at Washington State
A good article.
Hmmm... So the industry's studies all say the chemical is harmless, but independent and university scientists are saying it is certainly harmful to mammals with similar hormonal systems to ours, and is probably harmful to us.
Not hard to see who is more believable. Who has the highest stakes riding on how their studies turn out? Not the university scientists; they still get paid even if things don't turn out the way they thought. In fact, that's how this whole thing came up in Patricia Hunt's study at Washington State. She wasn't even looking for this at first; she was studying something else and just needed to find out why her mice had developed unforeseen reproductive defects. Corporate science, on the other hand--it may not be quite on the scale of cigarette companies releasing "studies" proving their products safe, but bias is bound to creep in. When billions of dollars and maybe the job of the researcher are at stake, the methodology and interpretation of the results are bound to reflect that influence.
Kudos to Canada for taking a proactive stance on this. Maybe it's not as big a problem as the evidence suggests...I hope it's not...but I'd rather be safe than sorry, and I'll trust the government and independent research before I'll trust the ethics of the corporate world. I wish I could say the government in the US was doing as good a job looking out for people and seeing the big picture.