Super Eco

Photo credit: chidsey, stock.xchng

Is the government protecting us from unsafe chemicals—or not? Even the most naive American consumers have reason to wonder, given the frantic wriggling of regulatory agencies last year over the safety of bisphenol-A (BPA). BPAs abound in plastic products, from baby bottles and drinking bottles to canned food linings and dental fillings. So when other countries found evidence that BPAs are toxic to the brain and reproductive system, they began pulling consumer products containing it.

Not the United States. Since last year, American consumers have been trapped between conflicting reports from the The National Toxicology Program (NTP), a part of the National Institutes of Health—expressing "some concern" that BPAs are harmful to human health—and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—stating that BPAs are safe "at current levels of exposure." Not even when the FDA's own science board questioned its analysis did the agency alter its stance.

A new in-depth investigation from Fast Company bursts open the whole debate over BPA safety. Consider these conclusions from the article:

• To some degree, the BPA controversy is a story about a scientific dispute. But even more, it's about a battle to protect a multibillion-dollar market from regulation. In the United States, industrial chemicals are presumed safe until proven otherwise. As a result, the vast majority of the 80,000 chemicals registered to be used in products have never undergone a government safety review. Companies are left largely to police themselves.
• Of the more than 100 independently funded experiments on BPA, about 90% have found evidence of adverse health effects at levels similar to human exposure. On the other hand, every single industry-funded study ever conducted -- 14 in all -- has found no such effects.

Feeling a little more nervous about who's watching out for your health? Fast Company's story graphically illustrates that the onus still lies on us, as consumers, to stay alert to the dangers that may lurk in products that have become ubiquitous in our lives. Let the buyer beware.