This article originally ran at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.
“Regrettable substitutions” occur when, capitulating to the demands of activists, manufacturers substitute ingredients or processes that prove to be inferior or actually harmful. The result can be a morass of customer dissatisfaction, damage to their brand, and litigation for product liability.
Many supposedly health-conscious consumers who choose products with labels like “BPA-Free” or “non-GMO” may be getting less than they bargained for. Not only are many of the scary sounding ingredients perfectly safe, but in their eagerness to meet consumer demand, manufacturers sometimes substitute ingredients or processes that prove to be inferior or actually harmful.
The blame lies mainly with activists and the news media fanning unwarranted public fears, but a recent academic study demonstrates how product manufacturers themselves may perpetuate spurious product concerns and drive consumers to take greater health risks.
The study, “The psychology of ‘regrettable substitutions’: examining consumer judgments of Bisphenol A [BPA] and its alternatives,” explores through the lens of product labeling how people evaluate the risks of BPA-a chemical that is a component of many plastics and is used in the lining of food cans to prevent bacterial contamination-compared to its alternatives. It found that the experimental subjects “may be guided less by what people know and more by the order in which they learn it. Notably, it appears that people evaluate a situation in which scientific evidence is tempered by controversy similarly to a situation in which there is no scientific evidence at all.”
The safety of BPA continues to be debated, although arguably controversy should have been put to rest long ago. Years of ongoing research and repeated assessments conducted by the FDA have concluded that BPA is, in fact, safe in normal use, as did a just-released report from Europe’s food regulator, the European Food Safety Authority:
EFSA’s comprehensive re-evaluation of bisphenol A (BPA) exposure and toxicity concludes that BPA poses no health risk to consumers of any age group (including unborn children, infants and adolescents) at current exposure levels. Exposure from the diet or from a combination of sources (diet, dust, cosmetics and thermal paper) is considerably under the safe level.
Those “safe levels” themselves have been set very conservatively by regulators to provide a wide margin of safety, but it seems that no amount of evidence will satisfy activists, and at their insistence, many manufacturers have eliminated BPA from their products.
The title of the article refers to the fact that BPA is often replaced with other, less-studied chemicals whose health implications are virtually unknown. This type of situation is known as a potential “regrettable substitution,” because the substitute material might actually be worse than the material that it replaces.
In spite of overwhelming evidence and support from regulators that current uses of BPA are not hazardous, fear-mongering activists and a small cadre of anti-BPA researchers continue to warn the public about the supposed dangers of the chemical. They have tried to link it to everything from obesity and behavioral disorders to asthma and decreased sperm counts and have sought to get it classified by government regulators as an “endocrine disruptor”-a potentially harmful mimic of natural hormones.
As some manufacturers have responded to these spurious claims by phasing out BPA from their products, they have had to move to dubious, less-tested, possible “regrettable substitutions,” such as Bisphenol S. In effect, their “BPA-free” labels, while accurate, exploit consumers’ lack of knowledge about the safety of the chemical and its alternatives.
This labeling has had an impact. Most people with any familiarity of BPA at all know it solely from the BPA-free sticker on bottles available in many stores, which conveys the unmistakable message that BPA is a health hazard. If it weren’t, why would it be excluded from the product? And why would the manufacturer tout the fact?
Risk perception is driven more by this sort of “logic” than by evidence. The “regrettable substitutions” study illustrates that merely the labeling of a product as “BPA-free” leads people to be so suspicious of it that even “when people are informed of the presence of substitute chemicals, labeling the alternative product as ‘free’ of Bisphenol A causes them to be significantly more likely to choose the alternative despite its ambiguity.”
What do we know about the alternatives to BPA? They are not only less studied but some activist scientists are now claiming that one common alternative has the same effects as BPA in a zebrafish experimental model. In addition, the alternatives may also be less effective than BPA. That is important, because BPA is employed as a lining of canned goods to help prevent bacterial contamination and food-borne illnesses such as botulism, so its removal may well diminish the safety of our food supply, not to mention increasing the costs of production.
The conclusion of the “regrettable substitutions” study is striking: “Our findings indicate that such [“BPA-free”] labels are misleading and cause some people to accept a substitute chemical that they might otherwise reject.”
A similar example concerns the inducement of food production behemoths General Mills and Post Foods to reformulate their iconic Cheerios and Grape Nuts cereals, respectively, so they can label the products as free of “genetically engineered” ingredients. Their regrettable substitution is the elimination of certain added vitamins from their products because they cannot obtain them from sources certified to be non-genetically engineered.
Thus, we have food producers trying to meet a perceived consumer demand but supplying products that are more expensive and inferior-inferior in having reduced nutrients (vitamins).
Similarly, two of the United States’ largest producers of baby food, Heinz and Gerber, responded to intimidation by anti-technology activists by shifting to non-genetically engineered ingredients for their products-even if these are nutritionally inferior or less safe than those made from genetically engineered plants.
Consider, for example, “Bt-corn,” crafted by splicing into commercial corn varieties a bacterial gene that codes for a protein toxic to corn-borer pests but not to mammals. As it fends off the insect pests, the genetically engineered corn also reduces the levels of Fusarium, a toxic fungus often carried into the plants by the insects. That, in turn, reduces the levels of fumonisin, a potent and dangerous fungal toxin that can lead to fatal diseases in horses and swine that ingest infected corn and that can cause esophageal cancer in humans.
Thus, using genetically engineered corn for food processing lowers the probability that harmful levels of fumonisin will be found in the final product. But simply because anti-biotechnology extremists have demanded it, companies like Heinz and Gerber have chosen to forego such genetically improved sources of foods that could yield healthier and safer products.
Even worse, Gerber has announced it will use mostly organic corn, which is especially prone to insect and bacterial infestations and will raise production costs because raising corn without insecticides and other chemicals is labor-intensive and produces lower per-acre yields. Organic corn will likely have far greater amounts of fumonisin and bacterial contamination.
Thus, manufacturers’ capitulation to demands based on irrational fears can lead to consumers being lured into dubious choices, as the result of labeling that is strictly accurate but fails to tell the whole story.
Sometimes, the regrettable substitutions result from hasty, wrong-headed decisions by governments. An example is the EU’s politically-motivated ban on the state-of-the-art pesticides called neonicotinoids, which began in 2013. Forced to resort to older, more toxic, less effective pesticides-primarily pyrethroids, which had been largely phased out-farmers in Europe are seeing a resurgence of insect predation. As a result, insect infestations may lead to a 15 percent drop in this year’s European harvest of canola, the continent’s primary source of vegetable oil used in food ingredients and as biodiesel. A regrettable outcome, to be sure.
There are important lessons in this saga. Decisions by governments should be data-driven, and manufacturers and retailers should resist the demands of activists and rely instead on scientific evidence, lest they stumble into a morass of eventual customer dissatisfaction, damage to their brand, and potential product liability. (In product liability law, “a design defect exists when a defect is inherent in the design of the product itself . . . a plaintiff can only establish a design defect exists when he proves there is hypothetical alternative design that would be safer that the original design, as economically feasible as the original design, and as practical as the original design, retaining the primary purpose behind the original design despite the changes made.” For many of the above examples of regrettable substitutions, these conditions should be easy to demonstrate.)
Finally, consumers should maintain healthy skepticism about the claims of self-interested, self-styled “consumer advocates.” Many elements of society share responsibility for offering and making sound choices in the marketplace.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
