Activists have convinced many manufacturers of plastic baby bottles and sippy cups to stop using the chemical bisphenol-A. Could the tin can be the next target?

Consumer Reports magazine had 19 name-brand foods, including vegetables, soup, juice, tuna and chili, tested at outside labs, and its researchers found the chemical present in virtually all of them. The highest concentrations of BPA were found in cans of green beans, vegetable soup and chicken soup.

The article is in the December issue of Consumer Reports; here’s an excerpt on the mag’s blog.

Canned organic foods were tested as well, and those “did not always have lower BPA levels than nonorganic brands of similar foods analyzed,” the article said. The chemical also was found in some canned foods that were labeled BPA-free.

Caroline Steele, manager of clinical nutrition and lactation services at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, said consumers should generally avoid packaged foods anyway.

“Those foods are OK in small amounts, but we tend to rely so much on them that what we need to focus on is getting more of a variety in our diet,” she said, adding that milk should be bought in cardboard containers because when the light hits a plastic container, it can break down the vitamins.

BPA is a synthetic chemical similar to estrogen used in many plastics. It’s also found in the epoxy used in the linings of metal cans. Studies on animals have found a link between BPA and a variety of health problems, including infertility, breast and prostate cancer, diabetes, weight gain and early onset puberty in children. Even the trendy SIGG metal water bottles have BPA in the models sold before August 2008.

USAToday’s Liz Szabo has written extensively about this issue, and here’s a good story about how the National Institutes of Health is using $30 million in federal stimulus money to study BPA. The FDA also is expected to weigh in with a report by the end of the month.

The people at the science Web site STATS have a different take, accusing CR of factual errors and calling the mag “shockingly irresponsible” for failing to note that the lining of cans prevents food spoilage, which can lead to bacterial contamination.

Consumer Reports says its food-safety scientists recommend limiting daily exposure to BPA to .0024 micrograms per kilogram of body weight. According to the research, a 165-pound adult eating one serving of canned green beans, which averaged 123.5 parts per billion of BPA, would ingest about .2 micrograms of the chemical per day. That’s roughly 83 times the amount recommended by the scientists.

Foods in plastic packaging generally showed lower levels of BPA, but not always, the researchers found. StarKist Chunk Light canned tuna averaged 3 ppb of BPA, while the same brand in a plastic pouch had levels too small to measure. Likewise, vegetables sold in plastic bags had small amounts of BPA compared with canned. (Complicating the research, a can of Del Monte Fresh Cut Green Beans Blue Lake had wildly varying levels, from 35.9 ppb to 191 ppb.)

CR tested two foods labeled “BPA-free”: Vital Choice tuna and Eden Baked Beans, which had 20 ppb and 1 ppb, respectively.

Anila Jacob, a scientist at the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C., called on the FDA to step in.

“They’ve been dragging their feet the last two or three years and not taking the science into account, and we’re hoping they decide to regulate this chemical to reduce exposure among vulnerable populations,” she said.

(Photo courtesy of Consumer Reports)

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• Panel challenges FDA’s ruling on BPA