Joanna Blythman on food additives

The food and drink industry is at pains to tell us that we needn't worry about the controversial packaging chemical Bisphenol A. Tests on laboratory animals have already put it in the frame as an endocrine disrupter, or "gender bender", which could interfere with the development of children and unborn babes. To add to that scary possibility, scientists at Exeter University have now found that adults with the chemical in their urine are twice as likely than those who haven't to suffer from heart disease, diabetes and liver abnormalities. That's worrying: 90% of the population has measurable levels.

The Food and Drink Federation and the British Soft Drinks Association were quick off the mark with this strangely familiar assurance: "Bisphenol A has been approved as safe for use in food and drink containers by the European Food Safety Authority, the UK Food Standards Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration. Its use is closely monitored and regulated  Food and drink can linings that include Bisphenol A contain well below the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) level set by the European Food Safety Authority."

Phew, well that's all right then. It's not as if we don't have enough to worry about, what with our banks going down the tube, our pensions turning to dust, heating and eating bills soaring and all that. But I'm not reassured, because after two decades of watching health scares come and go, I have become extremely cynical about official downplaying, sorry, "monitoring" of potential risks in the food chain. Bisphenol A provokes a powerful sense of déjà vu.

There's a set pattern to every food scare. It starts off with whistleblowers, generally environmental or health campaigners. Their concerns are based on a couple of bothersome scientific studies and common-sense, intuitive arguments, such as "How can it make sense to eat meat from animals fed on their ground-up, diseased peers ?", or "Why would anyone in their right mind want to eat food grown with insecticides designed as nerve gases in the second world war?" They are promptly rubbished by the regulatory authorities, the relevant business interests - pharmaceutical companies, plastic manufacturers, feed compounders et al - and the odd, seemingly independent toxicologist/microbiologist/nutritionist who just happens to be staffing most of his department with industry money.

So the campaigners get the bit between their teeth and strengthen their calls for action, raising consciousness of possible risks among consumers and banging on the door of legislators. And what happens? Years, even decades down the road, it turns out they were right.

People did get Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from eating burgers. Some even died. The pesticide lindane was once sprayed on our crops routinely, despite being a known carcinogen and disruptor of the central nervous system. Surprise, surprise, it is now banned in 50 countries, but for decades the industry fought to keep lindane and the acquiescent, so-called regulatory authorities let it get away with that until evidence incriminating the pesticide was piled up like snow at the door of an Alpine chalet. Anecdotal reports from parents that synthetic colours in children's foods and medicines were making their kids hyperactive have been accumulating since the 1970s. Forty years later, the EU has just got round to acknowledging this by labelling food and drink containing the suspect colourings with the words "may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children".

Occasionally the relevant regulatory bodies get it wrong by commission as well as omission. Remember how we were actively encouraged by plausible food hygiene authorities to abandon wooden chopping boards in favour of the so-called cleaner plastic equivalent? Now we know that that these rapidly degenerate into fertile breeding grounds for food-poisoning bacteria.

Custom and practice dictate that you never get a public climb-down from the industry, or an admission from regulators that they failed to act soon enough. All that happens is that behind the scenes, the more progressive parts of the industry see the writing on the wall and start quietly phasing out, reformulating or withdrawing the products in question.

Call me a scaremonger, but I don't think we can afford to sit around and wait for regulators to protect us from Bisphenol A or anything else. Their reaction time is slow and mired in a bog of commercial interest. Air fresheners, flame retardants, fabrics impregnated with synthetic anti-bactericidals, non-stick coatings our homes are full of potential hazards, and our bodies have never been exposed to such an onslaught of chemicals. Looming large among these, novel plastics that can only be notionally recycled in some obscure plant in East Germany and which may, quite possibly, be undermining our health.

If replicated, this latest research implicating Bisphenol A will mushroom into a major health issue. Together with all those nagging concerns over phthalates and other plasticisers, Bisphenol A is another very good reason for ditching plastic wherever possible in our homes and reverting, as much as is practically possible, to tried and tested materials like wood, cast iron, glass, ceramics, wickerwork and cork. Old tech? Certainly, but they've never looked so attractive.