We have the safest food supply in the world today - it has actually
never been safer. But there is always room for improvement. After more
than a year of deliberation and negotiation,
the Senate is poised this week to pass The Food Safety Modernization
Act. The legislation enjoys the rare distinction of having broad
bipartisan support. But the bill is at risk of being derailed by a
misguided and unnecessary amendment to ban something that does not
pose a real threat: bisphenol A (BPA).
The Ban Poisonous Additives Act, sponsored by Sens. Schumer (D NY) and
Feinstein (D CA), would bar the use of BPA, a key component used to
make epoxy resins and polycarbonate plastic, in food and beverage
containers. When asked why she proposed this amendment, Sen.
Feinstein made simplistic statement: "I feel very strongly that the
government should protect people from harmful chemicals."
The recent target of radical environmental activists and ratings-
seeking media alarmists, BPA has been accused of being associated with
an assortment of adverse health effects, none of which are supported
by acceptable scientific evidence or have been validated by FDA. BPA
critics have called the widely-used chemical the "biological
equivalent of global warming," and claims of its health effects run
the gamut from autism to cancer to genital and reproductive
abnormalities.
Not to be outdone by the global warming alarmists, the anti-industry
BPA fear mongers continue to propound flimsy "evidence" unsupported by
any reputable scientific body.
No fewer than 11 global regulatory agencies, including FDA, have
examined the science and concluded that BPA is not a risk to human
health. In its statement (released in January 2010), FDA concluded
that BPA "is not proven to harm children or adults..." This is
consistent with FDA's 2008 finding, which was updated at the
insistence of politicians and activists at a great cost to taxpayers.
If this overly precautionary FDA believed, after two thorough reviews,
that BPA posed a harm to anyone, they would not have left it on the
market. The science has spoken again and again, yet these anti-BPA
activists posing as scientists continue to use scare tactics and
ignore decades of convincing scientific research to waste money and
frighten Americans into echoing their ideology.