BPA exposure not likely to cause obesity, finds study

The American Chemistry Council (ACC) issued the following statement in response to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by Leonardo Trasande, M.D., New York University, et al, and scheduled to be discussed at a media briefing on Tuesday, September 18.  The following statement can be attributed to Steven G. Hentges, Ph. D., of the Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group of ACC:

"Attempts to link our national obesity problem to minute exposures to chemicals found in common, everyday products are a distraction from the real efforts underway to address this important national health issue. Due to inherent, fundamental limitations in this study, it is incapable of establishing any meaningful connection between BPA and obesity.  In particular, the study measures BPA exposure only after obesity has developed, which provides no information on what caused obesity to develop.

"The authors themselves state: 'Obesity develops over time, and causation cannot be inferred from a cross-sectional association of urinary BPA concentration…'  The authors further state that their work is 'at best hypothesis generating,' indicating that this study is speculative and might, at most, be the basis for conducting additional studies. 

"More relevant to actual, real-world safety is the recent, robust research funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and conducted by scientists at the government's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration. Consistent with previous human and animal studies, the Pacific Northwest study (Teeguarden et al.) indicates that, because of the way BPA is processed in the body, it is very unlikely that BPA could cause health effects at any realistic exposure level. Furthermore, regulators from Europe to Japan to the U.S. have recently reviewed hundreds of studies on BPA and repeatedly supported the continued safe use of BPA.

"It is also relevant to note that dozens of studies have monitored the body weight of laboratory animals exposed to BPA.  These studies found no consistent effect on body weight, indicating that BPA exposure is not likely to cause obesity."