Is the Can Worse Than the Soda?

DevotedSkeptic sends this excerpt about research that found a correlation between the use of a common food-packaging chemical and obesity rates. "Since the 1960s, manufacturers have widely used the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in plastics and food packaging. Only recently, though, have scientists begun thoroughly looking into how the compound might affect human health—and what they've found has been a cause for concern. Starting in 2006, a series of studies, mostly in mice, indicated that the chemical might act as an endocrine disruptor (by mimicking the hormone estrogen), cause problems during development and potentially affect the reproductive system, reducing fertility. After a 2010 Food and Drug Administration report warned that the compound could pose an especially hazardous risk for fetuses, infants and young children, BPA-free water bottles and food containers started flying off the shelves. In July, the FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups, but the chemical is still present in aluminum cans, containers of baby formula and other packaging materials. Now comes another piece of data on a potential risk from BPA but in an area of health in which it has largely been overlooked: obesity. A study by researchers from New York University, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a sample of nearly 3,000 children and teens across the country and found a 'significant' link between the amount of BPA in their urine and the prevalence of obesity."

Comments

Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

BPA or not, there is probably a significant link between teens who drink a lot of soda and those that don't. Maybe this obvious correlation is not causation issue is covered in the full publication (I only read the excerpt)... but if not, this is pretty damn stupid.

There is probably a significant link between the number of fast food wrappers scattered around someones home and obesity, but that doesn't mean the ink in the paper is to blame.

At the absolute minimum, "worse than the soda" is pretty unlikely. Soda is definitely bad for you, whereas BPA _might_ be bad young children and infants.

And in general, I think while environmental factors do probably contribute in a small way to obesity, it seems silly to worry about these things when the real causes are pretty damn obvious: eating wrong and getting no exercise. That bit o` BPA you drank probably made no difference, but your lifestyle of sitting in a chair all day at the office, then going home and sitting on a different chair until bed while eating a whopper probably made a huge difference.

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's assume BPA is bad. The question is, is it worse than no BPA? The reasons cans are lined with plastic are to prevent botulism and to keep the contents from eating through the cans.

Really, though, there's no reason we need to keep doing this. Just switch everything back to glass. The occasional shattering bottle is probably less of a danger to society than the constant poisoning through food and drinks.

Re:Silly

[AuralityKev]

I'd also like to see the stats on HFCS/sugar ratio in sodas from the 1960's to now graphed right alongside the BPA situation. Have the sodas themselves changed over time? I'd think that would have much more of an impact, along with sitting in a chair all day and eating whoppers.

Re:Silly

[MrEricSir]

The question is, is it worse than no BPA? The reasons cans are lined with plastic are to prevent botulism and to keep the contents from eating through the cans.

Or, you know, we could be lining our canned food items with something that's safe.

Re:Silly

[CanHasDIY]

Let's assume BPA is bad. The question is, is it worse than no BPA? The reasons cans are lined with plastic are to prevent botulism and to keep the contents from eating through the cans.

Really, though, there's no reason we need to keep doing this. Just switch everything back to glass. The occasional shattering bottle is probably less of a danger to society than the constant poisoning through food and drinks.

Not to mention, things just plain taste better when coming from a glass container.

Yes, I know that's entirely anecdotal, but instead of having your normal, knee-jerk reaction of pointing out the obvious, I implore the /. audience to go get a can of your favorite soda, and a glass bottle of the same, and do your own taste test.

Re:Silly

[platypusfriend]

Beer tastes better from a can, by a lot. The seal of the metal cap on a glass bottle is inferior to the metal-on-metal seal of a can. So, in addition to less UV radiation (fluorescent lights, Sun) reaching the isomerized hop alpha acids through the glass of a bottle, a metal can just plain ol' keeps more oxygen out. And that helps keep your beer fresh. Don't just take my word for it, though!.. Try a blind can-vs-bottle test, of the exact same beers, for yourself. It's really interesting.

Re:Silly

[Nadaka]

glass

Re:Silly

[Nadaka]

Sorry, but no. Canned beer is worse than bottled beer is worse than tap beer.

Re:Silly

[tnk1]

Soda in general is absolutely horrible. I've never really been very much overweight, but at one point I got up there enough to decide that I wanted to lose some weight. The first thing I did was cut my soda intake from whenever I felt like it down to "merely" twice a day. I lost ten pounds in just two or three weeks and the weight stayed off. I also cut down on other things afterward, but the weight never came off as fast as it did after first regulating my soda intake.

Having managed to successfully lose weight when I wanted to without resorting to salads or some special food, the secret to pure weight loss is simply not eating more calories than you need for the day. That's it. As long as you actually do it, as opposed to thinking that eating a gallon of "low fat" ice cream is going to make you lose weight, you always lose weight. There are days it spikes up and down, but if you maintain it day after day, you make steady progress.

Things like BPA or certain types of food are really only going to be corner cases. Your body cannot store fat from nowhere. If your body uses up all the calories ingested for that day for energy and then some, you will either lose fat or at the very least, you won't have much to make fat from. Endocrine problems are going to be an issue, but even if your body stores extra fat, it gets used up with normal daily exertion, and even more with exercise. You may never be thin, but you're not going to be obese.

Now, the major problem with things like soda isn't that it is soda, it's that it is a high calorie beverage that gives you zero nutritional value. That means to get proteins and nutrients, you have to eat other things which also have calories and you will become hungry for those things because your body won't allow you to fall over dead without letting you know something is missing. You get fat from soda because you have to eat other things with it. That goes even for diet soda (to a lesser extent). It also goes for anything that is high density fat/carbs, but lacks nutrition you need.

So, if BPA has made an epidemic of anything, I'd say it was more like an epidemic of being "slightly chubby", but not one of obesity.

Re:Silly

[anagama]

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale:

This isn't a Bud:
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/sierra-nevada-pale-ale-bottle-can/365/

And recently, it's being sold in bottles and cans -- I've seen it my local supermarkets:
http://www.craftcans.com/sierra-nevada-pale-alesierra-nevada-brewing-company

Re:Silly

[jenningsthecat]

...you're a tool if you think solid beer isn't available in can form.

It's only solid if it's frozen. I prefer my beer in a liquid state, thanks.

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until the late 1970s cans had a corrosion-resistant liner made from wax. This was replaced by bpa-based lacquers - I worked for a coatings vendor at this time who watched their business disappear due to this shift. Wax coatings were sprayed in just before the product, the BPA finish went on at the coil plant or can maker. To some extent it just pushed the liability upstream. The coatings we made we resistant to pretty much everything outside of aromatic solvents and heat. Depressing to see that what replaced them leeched chemicals into the food. Guess this is our version of the roman lead cooking pots.

Re:Silly

[timeOday]

And in general, I think while environmental factors do probably contribute in a small way to obesity, it seems silly to worry about these things when the real causes are pretty damn obvious: eating wrong and getting no exercise.

Oh boy, thanks for sharing your tremendously valuable Common Sense with us.

In fact this study is shocking and here is why (in bold):

The researchers pulled data from the 2003 to 2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, and after controlling for differences in ethnicity, age, caregiver education, income level, sex, caloric intake, television viewing habits and other factors, they found that children and adolescents with the highest levels of BPA in their urine had a 2.6 times greater chance of being obese than those with the lowest levels. Overall, 22.3 percent of those in the quartile with the highest levels of BPA were obese, compared with just 10.3 percent of those in the quartile with the lowest levels of BPA.

So here is what I pull from the emphasized bits:

• No, it is not explained by caloric intake. Nor by physical activity (or at least a proxy for it).
• The effect size is enormous. A 160% increase in risk of obesity!
• The sample size is large: 10.3% and 22.3% are both relatively large proportions of subjects in the study. So this is almost certainly not a spurious correlation between rare events.

The idea of significantly impacting the obesity epidemic simply by replacing BPA with something else is hard to believe. But occasionally a technical breakthrough on what was previously considered an issue of character and morality does does occur, and can be revolutionary: consider birth control.

Re:Silly

[rednip]

When I was a kid, the McDonald's large was the size of their smallest adult cup today, and the largest sandwich you could buy was a single quarter pound of meat.

Re:Silly

[BetterSense]

Shiner Bock
Heineken

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

BPA-free plastic has other chemicals that replace the functionality of BPA. We know less about those chemicals than we do about BPA. Pick your poison.

Re:Silly

[Chuckstar]

It's hard to control for caloric intake. You're relying on people self-reporting.

Also, contrary to popular myth, all calories are not the same. Your body absorbs much more energy from 100 calories of sugar, for example, than it does from 100 calories of raw vegetables. This is because calorie content is based on laboratory measurements and does not factor in calories lost when food is harder to digest, or when food is not fully digested (in which case the energy is instead absorbed/used by bacteria in the colon).

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

I think that we should paint the inside of houses with something besides lead paint. I think we should use something safer. Now, some of you will look to me for the answer, since I have no doubt that you believe that I just claimed to be an expert on the matter. I would like to point out that I can, in fact, want to use something safer without claiming to be an expert. It is an odd concept, I know, but really ... I assure you ... it is true.

Also, I - like many Americans - would like the government to do a better job. Again, you probably think I just claimed that I am a political genus. I once again feel the need to point out that I am not making such a claim. As it turns out I really can suggest we do something better even if I don't know exactly what that "something better" might be. I leave that to the experts, not because they have a solid track record, but because I am not, in fact, one of the experts.

It would be a sad(der?) world indeed if the barrier to wanting a better approach was expertise in the matter.

Re:Silly

[Zero__Kelvin]

I'm sorry. But I just ran objective tests on various beers using my Mass Beer Spectacle-ometer and it clearly indicated that bottled beer, while better than tap beer, is actually not as good as canned beer. It also indicated that Hillary Clinton is hot.

Re:Silly

[Fastolfe]

I have no idea if the OP's statements are accurate or not, but just because you consume something that has "100 calories" does not mean your body will metabolize 100 calories of energy. If the food is incompletely digested (perhaps because the food is hard to break down), you will excrete undigested food energy. The method used to determine caloric energy does not resemble the human digestive system, and it is indeed possible for only a portion of the measured food energy to actually be absorbed by the organism consuming it.

Re:Silly

[TechyImmigrant]

Indeed. But it goes further. There is substantial evidence that bulk fructose, in it's role as 50% of sucrose is the underlying cause of the modern rise of obesity.

The story goes like this..

The POMC neurons in the brain (the VMH - Ventromedial Hypothalamus to be precise) regulates energy expenditure are hunger based on levels of glucose, non esterified fatty acids and various hormones, principally insulin and leptin.

Bulk fructose damages those cells, so the regulation goes out of whack. Then the carb-insulin mechanism of obesity kicks in and you're sensitive to carbs. Now regardless of the leptin signaling and the copious NEFAs, the brain isn't telling the rest of the body that you're in an energy rich environment and so it resist burning fat in favor of storing it and you're hungry all the time.

The evidence is pretty good and getting stronger as new studies dig in. E.G. There are many ways to break the VMH in rats. Do it and they get fat. Starve them and they stay fat, but rob their own muscles and organs in order to survive, while leaving the fat cells intact. MSG will do it, Fructose will do it. An ice pick will do it. Section the brains of freshly dead fat people and they have exactly the same lesions in their VMH.

We never had bulk fructose until recent centuries and we never had it in the quantities we have it now. People fart around arguing about micro-nutrients and trace elements looking for reasons, but the macro-nutrients are where the first order effects can be explained.

Re:Silly

[Bremic]

For hundreds of years food and drink was regularly contained in a substance called "glass". Some of these glass containers have survived more than a century of regular use are are still considered safe and functional.

After drinking soda that had been stored from the factory in a glass bottle, I was surprised how the same soda out of a can tasted very different, and I rarely drink out of cans.
Plastics then became common (in the 80s) and the flavor was again very different. The rare times I drink soda now I still try to get it in glass.

I understand this isn't a solution, but if (as a society) we have put convenience ahead of health and safety, then we shouldn't be ridiculing those who suggest we should have chosen a different path. It has been very obvious since soda was put in cans that the cans affected the contents, simply through taste.

Re:Silly

[potpie]

Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.

We already know soda drinkers are fat

[mewsenews]

Everyone on /. already knows correlation != causation. People that drink 2L bottles of soda on a regular basis are going to high higher BPA and higher obesity.

Re:We already know soda drinkers are fat

[reverseengineer]

Well, they shouldn't, if they're drinking out of 2L bottles, most of which are polyethylene terephthalate and generally do not contain BPA, which is why the focus here is on the epoxy liners of many aluminum cans. They did try to control for caloric intake in the study:

Controlling for race/ethnicity, age, caregiver education, poverty to income ratio, sex, serum cotinine level, caloric intake, television watching, and urinary creatinine level, children in the lowest urinary BPA quartile had a lower estimated prevalence of obesity (10.3% [95% CI, 7.5%-13.1%]) than those in quartiles 2 (20.1% [95% CI, 14.5%-25.6%]), 3 (19.0% [95% CI, 13.7%-24.2%]), and 4 (22.3% [95% CI, 16.6%-27.9%]).

However, they also admit in the conclusions, "Explanations of the association cannot rule out the possibility that obese children ingest food with higher BPA content or have greater adipose stores of BPA."

Amount in urine

[Anonymous Coward]

The studies that look at the mount of BPA in urine drive me crazy. They take a group of people, give them some food or liquid with BPA, then freak out when it's in their urine.

I'll let you in on a little secret here: humans have the ability to excrete BPA. Mice do not. All those studies that show health issues in mice from BPA ingestion are testing on creatures that cannot rid their bodies of the compound.

Re:Amount in urine

[kEnder242]

I googled something and found something that disputes your claim that

humans have the ability to excrete BPA. Mice do not.

http://healthandenvironmentonline.com/issue-archive/bpa-science-safety-1/

Slashdot: A mix between a peer review journal and "bum fights"

Re:Amount in urine

[the eric conspiracy]

Dr Julia Taylor, the author of this work, is a co-worker of Prof Frederick S. vom Saal. von Saal is the primary BPA critic and is under a lot of criticism because much of his work has been found to be not reproducable in large multigeneration studies done in national labs both in the United States and Europe.

Lack of reproducability in small volume academic exploratory studies is a big problem in the endocrine literature. It's very worth being aware of when evaluating these papers.

http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articles/PMC3135059//reload=0;jsessionid=SXzQiL3qssivuEwafSgl.24

strange end result

[Tumbleweed]

World saved by Mexican Coke! (Coca-Cola, that is).

Re:I'm a fat bastard..

[Adult film producer]

It's probably time for me to change my habits. I'm 270 right now when my optimal genetic weight is probably about 195/200 (as my father and brothers are.) Frankly, sometimes the weight hurts my ankles... I spend way too much time in front of the computer editing video and drinking coffee. Its kind of pathetic.

Maybe I should take this moment to reflect and do something about it, I know I would be a lot happier if I did.

WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[Taco Cowboy]

One thing about this article submit is that it only tells part of the story.

BPA lining is not only present in the soda can.

BPA lining is also present in CANNED FOOD - yes, inside the cans that are used for CANNED FOOD

http://www.thedailygreen.com/going-green/tips/bpa-in-canned-foods

Re:WARNING: BPA lining in CANNED FOOD as well !!

[smooth wombat]

If people are too lazy to extract the contents of a can into a pan, there are other issues to consider than just what lines a can.

But as I keep getting modded down when I talk about personal responsibility in healthcare, I guess that goes out the window as well when talking about safely handling food.

Other sources of BPA might be worse

[TimTucker]

There's also the finding that many types of thermal paper contain much larger amounts of BPA than food packaging:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/07/28/study-finds-bpa-in-store-receipts-health-effects-as-yet-unclear/

Would be interesting if the link between obesity and eating fast food was only partly due to the food itself and partly due to handling the receipts.

Re:BPA is everywhere

[timeOday]

There is not an infinite supply of BPA in any given bottle or water pipe. The thing with a pop can is it's single use, so you're always getting a fresh dose.