Keeping us safe from ourselves has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Consumer groups, environmental organizations, the trial bar, the medical establishment, university researchers, and the government are all working together, doing all they can to prevent us from making what they consider to be bad choices. They treat the pursuit of safety as a license to deprive us of our ability to make informed choices.
A case on point involves the chemical Bisphenol-A. Most commonly known as BPA, it’s a substance used in the production of plastics and resins, as well as in the lining of aluminum cans. As such, BPA often comes into contact with foods we eat and liquids we drink.
Activist groups have long had BPA in their sights — they claim that it’s dangerous. They do this despite the fact that incontrovertible evidence that has shown, time and again, that BPA is safe for humans at the levels found in the consumer products that use it. Nevertheless, slick marketing campaigns targeting nervous mothers (and, ultimately, the politicians they vote for) have convinced many to ignore the science and focus instead on the market research. This means giving consumers a product that is “safe enough” – that is, a product that they can feel good about buying, rather than something that actually represents the best application of current technology.
The latest of these distortions comes from the self-appointed Environmental Working Group (EWG), which recently posted a statement on its website attacking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for asserting, once again, that BPA is safe.
“The fight about BPA safety is really a fight over the science of endocrine disruption, which has upended many traditional scientific notions of toxicity,” the EWG said in the post. “The field grew from the discovery that some chemicals block or stimulate the body’s hormone systems and that exposure to even miniscule concentrations of these chemicals can have large effects” on human health and physiology, as well as that of wildlife and laboratory animals.
In essence, the argument is that BPA, while not harmful to humans in high doses, might be toxic in small amounts. To the EWG, it’s the FDA that is behind the times in its research protocols and is, therefore, somehow in a kind of intellectual or scientific collusion with the industries that it is supposed to regulate.
“Given the FDA’s reliance on old scientific methods,” says the EWG, “it’s not news that the agency won’t budge from its position that BPA is not toxic at the levels to which humans are exposed in everyday life.” What it wants instead is yet another study, one that will even more fully measure the effects on human beings of a chemical already proven time and again to be safe.
The EWG intransigence flies just not in the FDA’s conclusions but those of the European Food Safety Authority, which announced Tuesday the chemical poses “no health risk to consumers of any age group (including unborn children, infants, and adolescents) at current exposure levels.”
Rather than consider how many lives are saved because BPA guards against food-borne illnesses, the consumer safety lobby wants it banned over unproven theories about low dose exposure that conveniently come to light when the risk of exposure from high doses is knocked down for the umpteenth time. Self-appointed watchdogs should be no longer be allowed to interpose themselves between industry experts and ill-informed consumers. Perhaps it is time to apply the same rigorous standards to the claims of critics as to those made by manufacturers. The pseudo-science being used to attack products that incorporate BPA involves the same kind of discredited methodologies employed in other chemical scares. The precautionary principle may grab headlines and invoke hysteria; it also has the potential to do as much damage to people as fraudulent claims made by the patent-medicine peddlers of old, whose careless talk helped spawn the food safety industry in the first place.
Peter Roff is a senior fellow at the Frontiers of Freedom.
