"Cans Bring BPA To Dinner, FDA Confirms"

"Federal chemists have confirmed what everyone had expected: that if a bisphenol-A-based resin is used to line most food cans, there’s a high likelihood the contents of those cans will contain at least traces of BPA. A hormone-mimicking compound, BPA is the monomer — or chemical building block — used in making the resin. Earlier studies had shown that this resin tends to shed BPA.

In their new paper, Gregory Noonan, Luke Ackerman and Timothy Begley of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in College Park, Md., acknowledge that BPA had turned up in the limited studies that had sought it out. But those studies had tended to look at a narrow range of products, such as baby food, infant formulas or soft drinks — or to have assayed foreign foods.

'It was clear that there were no large scale studies of the U.S. market,' they note, 'and that there were significant data gaps for highly consumed canned foods, such as chili, pastas and pork and beans.' So they focused their survey on the most widely consumed U.S. canned goods."

Janet Raloff reports for Science News May 25, 2011.