The President’s Cancer Panel has taken up the BPA issue. I’m referring to bisphenyl A, a plastics additive that is also a synthetic estrogen, subject of controversy.

In a 200-page report that was issued yesterday, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the two doctors on the panel are calling for America to re-think the way we allow chemicals into our environment including our food.  Here’s the problem: 41 percent of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lives. That number is way too high. We shouldn’t be complacent about it.

The panel is recommending eating organic food, checking radon levels in the home, and microwaving food in glass rather than plastic. But it’s focusing on the chemicals in our environment.

“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says, according to Kristof.  “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

On the BPA controversy, the panel weighs in on the side of caution. “Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect,” wrote Kristof.

Among the panel’s recommendations: filter your drinking water, and store it in glass or stainless steel containers.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html