Heath Risks When Reusing Food Cans

I would just like to have you post the following in response to the recipes I have seen here that call for using empty food cans that are on this site:

Please don't re-use empty cans to cook or heat anything in. Most cans nowadays have a toxic plastic material called Bisphenol A (BPA) inside them to keep the metal from affecting the taste of the food. Unfortunately the BPA is the same as has been used to make baby bottles and many other hard plastic water bottles. BPA has been linked to breast cancer and early puberty in women and when they tested very low doses on mice and rats they found the same plus diabetes, enlarged prostate and prostate cells prone to cancerous changes among the many health problems it can cause. The food that is in these cans is also contaminated by the BPA but then if you reuse the container by cooking or heating anything in them you release up to 50 times more of the BPA into the food.

Google BPA or check out Wikipedia's BPA page and it will make you not want to eat anything in cans anymore, period. Of course the chemical companies all say that the fears are unjustified just because a few rats and mice get sick doesn't mean anything. Sound like Big Tobacco some 20-30 years ago, huh? My sis-in-law who is a real pessimist says "Oh, well, these days everything is being found to give us cancer so why fight it?" I choose to fight it however and whenever I can, thank you very much.

By Evelyn Rios