The additive BPA used in the interior plastic linings of many canned foods has been linked to serious health problems:

BPA in canned food linings.

I'm wondering if this risk might be exacerbated when heating food in the can as might be done by a fire or some other means in an emergency situation.

I know, the "lesser of the evils", but no sense in making a bad situation worse if it can be avoided.

i have no idea about the "science" involved in BPA but i heat the sealed cans in boiling water with the idea that the canning process involves just that to sterilize/cook the food inside and the plastic should stand up to that amount of heat.

I, for one, am still waiting for someone to publish a study on the effects of BPA found in the packaging of birth control pills.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

Is there a risk? Maybe.

Is it statistically significant? No.

We don't know the true statistics, so we can't say if it's significant or not.

Sue

When studies are done on juvenile mice, they use BPA concentrations that work out to be be about the equivalent of a 200 pound man eating a nalgene bottle a day. Being a fully grown adult with normal and healthy hormonal level, the amount of BPA that you get from normal (or even slightly abnormal but irregular) usage shouldn't have a significant impact.

It's like sacchrine. Sweet & Low carries a warning on it almost as dire as cigarettes, but we now know that the cancer risk for most people from it's usage is very low.

Having now taken the time and trouble to re-review the article I linked to in my original post, I see the following about risk:

“...it takes as little as one serving of canned foods to expose a person to levels of BPA that have been shown to cause harm in laboratory animals.”

Maybe Blast will go back through and link his professional and scientific response to the BPA hoax....

...but essentially IIRC, there is more BPA in the water you drink in one day than the what would leach over the lifetime of the bottle you're drinking from.

I also believe it was mentioned, and I could be way off, you would have to drink multiple 1000s of gallons of water daily to ingest enough BPA to affect the human body.

I'll worry more about mercury in fish, crypto and girardia in untreated water, not cleaning or cooking a kill all the way, a rock falling on my head, falling off a trail, or suffering from personal stupidity before I worry about BPA leaching from a bottle or can.

As someone who has had the immensely educational experience of surviving cancer, and perhaps even more significantly the treatment for the cancer, I can absolutely say that I look at these kinds of risks from a slightly different perspective now. ;-)

People who have been through this experience definitely see with different eyes.