Are Whole Foods and Other Retailers Slowly Poisoning Their Employees?

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Bisphenol A, or BPA for short, has been in the news quite a bit lately.

The chemical is widely recognized in the scientific and food safety communities as an endocrine disruptor and carcinogen. Unfortunately, BPA has been contaminating the foods of the American public via leeching from food containers for years, specifically from aluminum cans used for canned goods and soft drinks.

Although several politicians are proposing legislative actions for stricter regulations on the chemical, the most notable of whom is California Senator Diane Feinstein, who recently drafted a bill to ban the chemical in California, legal action has yet to be take to modify the current U.S. human exposure limit set by the EPA.

Banning BPA entirely may not be as reactionary as it sounds. The chemical has been found to have substantial health implications in mammals at levels much lower than the current EPA designations for safe exposure.

These include changes to breast tissue and to the genital track in mice at levels 400 times lower than the current U.S. exposure limit.

A 2008 study by Iain Lang and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association found higher bisphenol A levels to be significantly associated with heart disease, diabetes, and abnormally high levels of certain liver enzymes.

Essentially, there is no safe level of BPA consumption. Any amount of exposure can cause permanent reproductive tissue damage.

Yet almost everyone in America has been exposed.

Studies by the CDC found bisphenol A in the urine of 95% of adults sampled in 1988–1994 and in 93% of children and adults tested in 2003–04.

So even though BPA one of the most carcinogenic and toxic chemicals we've ever studied, we continue to use it to line a massive number of our food containers. And due to food industry lobbying, legislation banning the chemical is proving exceedingly hard to get passed.

Although the vast majority of BPA exposure comes through food (via the thin coat of plastic used in canned goods to protect the food from direct contact with metal,) exposure can also come from other sources, such as direct skin contact.

A study from the Environmental Working Group released this week tested receipts in several major retail outlets to see whether the printer paper contained BPA. The results were surprising and tragic: several major food chains, including Whole Foods, WalMart and Safeway, had extremely high levels of BPA on their receipts, "250 to 1,000 times greater than other, more widely discussed sources of BPA exposure, including canned foods, baby bottles and infant formula."

Scientists have not determined how much of a receipt's BPA coating can transfer to the skin and from there into the body. A study published July 11 by scientists with the Official Food Control Authority of the Canton of Zürich in Switzerland found that BPA transfers readily from receipts to skin and can penetrate the skin to such a depth that it cannot be washed off. This raises the possibility that the chemical infiltrates the skin's lower layers to enter the bloodstream directly.

While this is obviously a concern even for frequent shoppers of these chains, the news couldn't be worse for the retail employees themselves, who may handle hundreds of transactions and the toxic receipts every day that they work. Each time they hand a customer a receipt, BPA could be leaching directly into their bloodstream.

Whose receipts were dangerous?

• McDonald's
• CVS
• KFC
• Whole Foods
• Wal-Mart
• Safeway
• U.S. Postal Service

The saddest part of all is that the issues surrounding BPA exposure aren't at all new revelations. Studies have been coming out since at least the year 2000 showing that even low exposure to the chemical can have highly deleterious effects on human health.

In fact, the nation's largest thermal paper maker, Appleton Papers Inc. of Appleton, Wisconsin, dropped BPA from its formulation in 2006 out of concern regarding the negative health effects of the chemical.

Whole Foods has a section of their web site dedicated to explaining what BPA is to customers which takes a clear position against the chemical:

We are committed to helping our customers protect themselves and their families and as such are concerned about the growing body of research which connects BPA and other estrogenic compounds, including phthalates, to certain negative health effects. We are currently evaluating certain products and packaging materials on a variety of criteria, including endocrine activity, toxicity, recyclability and functionality. Our goal is to help our shoppers avoid endocrine-active materials in products and packaging where functional alternatives exist.

While it is commendable to have a corporate position on the issue available online, one would think that in keeping with the commitment it would be common sense for Whole Foods to be using BPA-free receipt paper.

Walmart is in a similar position. While they were publicly commended for phasing out BPA plastics from their shelves in 2008 and 2009, this will be little consolation to employees who have been handling BPA-laden receipts for the last several years.