FDA's current consumer page on bisphenol A states plainly that "BPA is safe at the current levels occurring in foods." The basis for that sentence is a review the agency completed in the fall of 2014, covering roughly 300 studies published between November 2009 and July 2013. Nothing on the page has changed since. In the European Union, a regulation banning BPA from most food-contact materials entered into force on January 20, 2025.
That's the plain contradiction. What's happened since traces a longer, more specific story on both sides of it.
In January 2022, a coalition of health and consumer groups — the Environmental Defense Fund, Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, Consumer Reports, and the Endocrine Society among them — filed a formal petition asking FDA to reconsider BPA's safety in polycarbonate plastics, metal can coatings, and other food-contact materials, citing newer research than the agency's 2014 review had covered. FDA agreed to reconsider and set itself an internal deadline of October 31, 2022, to decide. That deadline passed without a decision, and it has stayed that way since: under the docket number FDA-2022-F-1108-0001, the petition remains open, with no substantive FDA response as of this writing — more than three and a half years after it was filed, according to EDF's own tracking of the docket.
While that petition sat, EFSA moved. In April 2023, the European Food Safety Authority published a re-evaluation of BPA that set a new tolerable daily intake of 0.2 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day — a reduction of roughly 20,000-fold from the 4-microgram figure EFSA itself had used since 2015. That new, far more conservative number became the scientific basis for the European Commission's food-contact-material ban: Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/3190, adopted December 19, 2024, entered into force January 20, 2025, with an 18-month transition period for most affected products to come into compliance — a window that has now closed. FDA's own review, on the other side of the Atlantic, has not been updated to weigh in on EFSA's new number at all.
None of this is as simple as "Europe is stricter, case closed," and the brand's own house rule about that framing holds here too, because Europe doesn't agree with itself on this one. Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, BfR, publicly declined to adopt EFSA's new tolerable daily intake, citing what it called scientific and methodological disagreements with how EFSA derived the number from the underlying toxicology. BfR's own figure landed at roughly 0.2 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day — a thousand times higher than EFSA's. So the honest divergence story here isn't binary. It's three positions: FDA's unchanged 2014 view, EFSA's sharply lower 2023 figure that now underwrites an actual EU-wide ban, and Germany's own national food-safety agency landing somewhere in between, unconvinced by its own continental regulator.
This isn't FDA's first time touching BPA, and its last action is a useful lesson in reading a regulatory headline carefully. In July 2012, FDA amended its food-additive regulations to stop authorizing BPA-based polycarbonate resin for baby bottles and sippy cups — a change frequently described since as "FDA bans BPA in baby bottles." FDA's own final rule says otherwise: the agency was explicit that the amendment "is not based on safety, but is based on the fact that regulatory authorization is no longer necessary," because manufacturers representing over 97 percent of global polycarbonate production had already stopped selling it for that use. FDA didn't even take comment on BPA's safety as part of that action. The 2012 change removed a use nobody was making anymore; it did not revisit the safety conclusion that's still sitting on FDA's website today.
The underlying health-research picture is why EFSA moved and FDA hasn't. BPA is an endocrine-disrupting compound, meaning it can interact with the body's hormone-signaling systems at low doses, and the newer research driving EFSA's 2023 reassessment focused on immune-system effects — specifically effects on a type of white blood cell called T-helper cells — that weren't part of the evidence base FDA's 2014 review considered. That's a real scientific advance, not a reinterpretation of old data, which is part of why BfR's disagreement is worth taking seriously rather than waving away: reasonable toxicologists are reading the same emerging evidence differently, and FDA hasn't yet said which reading it finds more persuasive, or why.
On the label, BPA itself isn't something a shopper can look for by name, because it's rarely declared as such — it shows up in the epoxy lining of some canned goods and in certain rigid plastic containers, not as a listed ingredient. Some manufacturers voluntarily market products as "BPA-free," which is a real and verifiable claim about that specific compound, but it says nothing about what replaced it; several substitute bisphenols with similar chemical structures are now in wide use and have their own, separately unresolved safety questions that neither FDA nor EFSA has fully closed out.
None of this resolves into a verdict, and that's the point. A three-and-a-half-year-old petition FDA still hasn't answered, a European ban now in full effect, and Germany's own regulator publicly unconvinced by the number underneath that ban — three positions, not two, and none of them finished. PurityIQ doesn't try to collapse that into a score. It shows you, at the shelf, whether a scanned product's packaging is one where BPA is a live question, and puts the actual regulatory record next to it — the FDA docket, the EU regulation, the German dissent — cited to the source, not to an advocacy group's summary of it. You see the record. You decide.
As of September 2026, FDA maintains that BPA is safe at current food-contact exposure levels based on its 2014 review, the 2022 reconsideration petition remains pending under docket FDA-2022-F-1108-0001, and the EU's food-contact-material ban under Regulation (EU) 2024/3190 is now in full effect following the close of its transition period.
Sources
FDA, Bisphenol A (BPA): Use in Food Contact Application — https://www.fda.gov/food/food-packaging-other-substances-come-contact-food-information-consumers/bisphenol-bpa-use-food-contact-application
Federal Register, Indirect Food Additives: Polymers (BPA/polycarbonate abandonment, baby bottles and sippy cups), 77 FR 41899 (Jul. 17, 2012) — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2012/07/17/2012-17366/indirect-food-additives-polymers
EDF, "FDA agrees to reconsider safety of BPA in food packaging" (petition origin, docket FDA-2022-F-1108-0001) — https://www.edf.org/media/fda-agrees-reconsider-safety-bpa-food-packaging
EDF Health, "The European Union marks one year of its BPA ban…where is the FDA??" (Jan. 12, 2026) — https://blogs.edf.org/health/2026/01/12/the-european-union-marks-one-year-of-its-bpa-banwhere-is-the-fda/
EFSA, Re-evaluation of the risks to public health related to the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in foodstuffs, EFSA Journal 2023 (new TDI 0.2 ng/kg bw/day) — https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/plain-language-summary/re-evaluation-risks-public-health-related-presence-bisphenol-bpa-foodstuffs
Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/3190 of 19 December 2024 (BPA ban in food contact materials) — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/3190/oj/eng
European Commission, "Commission adopts ban of Bisphenol A in food contact materials" (Dec. 19, 2024) — https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety-news/commission-adopts-ban-bisphenol-food-contact-materials-2024-12-19_en
PackagingLaw.com, "EFSA Significantly Lowers Tolerable Daily Intake of BPA; BfR Disagrees" (reporting BfR's own 0.2 µg/kg bw/day figure) — https://www.packaginglaw.com/news/efsa-significantly-lowers-tolerable-daily-intake-bpa-bfr-disagrees
FoodNavigator, "BPA is a health risk: EFSA sets new TDI for Bisphenol A" (quoting EFSA panel chair Dr. Claude Lambré on the T-helper cell finding) — https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2023/04/19/BPA-is-a-health-risk-EFSA-sets-new-TDI-for-Bisphenol-A/