What's your take on (bisphenol A) plastic bottles?

[Cat_Whisperer]

I can’t fault anyone for wanting to do the best for their baby, of course, but there’s reasonable precaution, and there’s bubblewrapping baby. According to this site - WARNING - WORD DOCUMENT DOWNLOAD-,

Although there is no universal agreement on what constitutes a safe intake, there is a consensus among regulatory agencies that rodents treated with 5 milligrams of BPA per kg of body weight do not experience any adverse effects. This is referred to as the “no observed adverse effect level,” or NOAEL. Building in a safety factor of 100, these agencies have proposed a Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) for humans of 0.05 milligrams per kg.
Now let’s get back to the bottles. And let’s consider “worst case scenarios.” So we’ll focus on baby bottles, because if BPA presents a risk, it is expected to be most significant during the developmental stage. In the most recent study, the maximum amount of BPA that leached into water from a polycarbonate bottle was 8 nanograms per milliliter. Let’s assume a baby were to drink a liter of this water. One milligram is a million nanograms, so the total intake would be 0.008 milligrams. If the baby weighs 5 kg (11 lbs), we have an intake of 0.0016 mg per kg of body weight. This is about one-thirtieth the TDI and one three-thousandth the “no observable adverse effect level,” in test animals!

In other words, walking your baby through a smoky room is likely to be more poisonous than the BPAs in baby bottles.

The article goes on to make a couple more germane points:

Right now, the light is being cast on bisphenol A, while numerous hormone-like substances lurk in the darkness.

Take lavender scented soaps and lotions, for example. These have been linked with breast growth in young boys. As it turns out, lavender oil activates estrogen regulating genes in human breast cells. Alfalfa sprout extracts display increased breast cancer cell proliferation above levels seen with estradiol, an estrogen. Soybeans contain natural estrogenic compounds, and so does milk. Milk represents a far greater estrogenic exposure than we experience from BPA. Our average daily intake of estrogens through milk is about 370 nanograms which is roughly what would be found in 50 mL of water from a polycarbonate bottle. Nobody is suggesting the banning of milk even though it contains a good dose of estrogenic compounds. And neither should they.

And that’s not all. Nonylphenol, an ingredient in numerous detergents, is estrogenic. It ends up in sewage, along with the natural estrogens and birth control pill remnants excreted by women. Sewage treatment plants do not remove these substances and they can end up in surface water as well as in ground water when sewage sludge is spread on fields as fertilizer. In other words we are awash in a sea of both natural and synthetic hormone disrupting substances and it is unrealistic to accuse a specific one of being the devil incarnate.

This does not mean that we should be cavalier about hormone-like substances in the environment. Even though there is no evidence that at the levels encountered BPA presents a risk to humans, we can’t rule out the possibility that babies may not excrete BPA as efficiently as adults, or that the chemical may have a synergistic effect when combined with other endocrine disrupting substances. Baby bottles made of glass or other plastics are available, and it seems a good idea to search for viable alternatives to the epoxy lining in canned foods. But panic over drinking from polycarbonate bottles is unwarranted, and talk of banning polycarbonate plastics is naive.

I stand by my earlier assertion that Health Canada taking BPA baby bottles off the shelf is ass-covering triggered by hysteria from people who have unfortunately only encountered the junk science that you’ll get from the 6 o’clock news, not the full story. Of course, there is no absolute certainty, so I’ll soften my stance to avoid BPA baby bottles if you really feel like you have to.

[Vlad_Igor]

Bisphenol (BpA) has been around for a while, generating plenty of papers here (Search for “Bisphenol A endocrine” to get a listing of articles and reviews). BpA has been known to have endocrine-like effects on cells in culture and in some animal models, but human epidemiology has not supported the lab data so far. If there are effects, they may well be small in comparison to other environmental toxins present in much higher concentrations. Long-term effects might be possible, but in the 15 years or so that BpA has been around in significant amounts, significant adverse effects haven’t been detected.

Vlad/Igor

[Coil]

What Featherlou said/wrote.

From what I’ve read about it all it seems to be yet another scare based on animals, mice in this case, being affected if they are fed huge amounts of it. I recall reading somewhere that in this case the metabolism is quite different in mice and humans so that while it affects mice it more or less passes straight through us.

Just another scare.

[Cat_Whisperer]

I think I’m going to start calling it “Six O’Clock Science” - as in, “Tune in to our news at six o’clock so we can tell you the latest thing that might kill your family!” With no context, no balanced reporting, and never, ever any follow-up. Just enough of a smidgen of information that people trying to do the right thing aren’t sure if they should believe it or not, so err on the side of believing what should have never been broadcast so irresponsibly in the first place.

Uh, this might be a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

[Labrador_Deceiver]

Thanks for the 411, featherlou. I have a toddler, and another on the way, so I’ve been reading a bit about this lately. Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad about the BPA bottles I decided not to throw away.

[Orual]

As far as I can tell from TV news, everything I eat, drink, breathe, or wear is somehow going to give me cancer.

I don’t know how I get through the day.

[iamthewalrus_3]

I figure I’m way more likely to die while driving to the store to buy a replacement bottle.