A group of researchers discovered that for low-income elementary school children are likely to eat food given by the government rather than bringing a packed lunch from home.
According to the Northern Kentucky Tribune, these alleged school meals may contain a chemical often found in plastic packaging or canned goods called bisphenol. Paige Miller, one of the researchers from Stanford University, reported that unsafe levels of BPA can disrupt the human hormones and there is a higher risk of other health effects including cancer or reproductive problems.
Stanford's Prevention Research Center and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health did the research to the urban, suburban and rural schools in San Francisco. The study was published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.
Jennifer Hartle, a researcher, told Miller that she observed that during school site visits, almost every school meal came from a can or plastic packaging: Pre-packaged, pre-cooked and pre-seasoned. Apples, oranges and bananas are the only items that didn't come in plastic bag.
The team tracked how much BPA intake in terms of microgram per kilogram of body weight per day. The toxicity for humans is unknown because it's also unknown how the human body metabolizes BPA. The Environmental Protection Agency said that 50 micrograms or less per kilogram of the body weight is a safe consumption level.
However, after then a lot of scientific papers discovered the harmful effects of BPA even at a lower level than that of the EPA standard. Thus, the European Food Safety Authority updated its standards for safe BPA intake to 4 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day. The study showed that a student having pizza and milk with canned fruits and vegetables consumes the minimal level of BPA up to 1.19 microgram per kilogram every day in school.
According to the study co-author Robert Lawrence of Johns Hopkins there is no certain proof that a specific dose of BPA can have a specific effect. However, we know that it can have an impact to human health. As the animal models showed, there can be a lot of health effects. The study needs to take a careful approach.
