Bisphenol A

And your stand on BPA in hard plastic containers (#7) and linings in baby food containers, etc.?

[Jenise]

What a catchy thread title. You know I've been thinking for months now that someone needed to start a thread called Bisphenol H, glad you were THE ONE.



I'm sorry, I'm being a brat. You know what, I don't know what to make of this. Especially if I decide against it, that means my new hard plastic Rubbermaid containers for storing leftovers etcetera that I just LOVE LOVE LOVE because they're the best thing EVER made by anyone ANYWHERE for storing leftovers in (the containers stack, the lids lock onto the bottoms an onto each other) and that I invested heavily in to replace my mishmash collection of other things just months before this became an issue, would have to go. Obviously, that would be most inconvenient.

Flattery will get you everywhere.

This ranks about #2,463,994 on my list of things to worry about. Lawyers, so-called consumer advocates, and ignorant reporters (redundancy, I know).

To paraphrase a bumper sticker, more people died in Teddy Kennedy's car than died from BPA in Nalgene bottles.

[Jenise]

Flattery will get you everywhere.

Smooch!

I'll defer to "Chemical Mark" on this issue.
BP

OK, first of all it's bisphenol A (aka BPA), the main building block of polycarbonate polymers, which are hard, clear plastics that are used in all sorts of applications. BPA is an endocrine disruptor, meaning that it mimics the behavior of a hormone in the human body, in this case estrogens. As such, children shouldn't be exposed to it any more than necessary. The problem is that it's used in making many common plastics, so unless you're going to ban plastics from your house, there's no practical way to eliminate it from your child's environment, but I'd probably avoid getting polycarbonate baby bottles which will be heated, as that's been shown to leach BPA into baby formula or milk. BPA also can leach from the epoxy resin used to line canned foods, so there's another reason not to eat too many (commercially) canned foods.

Adults really aren't at serious risk from BPA exposure and I wouldn't panic over it in any event. There are far more potent endocrine disruptors in our daily lives, so BPA is a relatively minor threat.

Mark Lipton

Weird. I had Bisphenol A originally and for some reason changed it to Bisphenol H. It's now back to the original.

I say ban it. Civilization survived for millennia without BPA. It can do so again.

-Paul W.

I say ban it. Civilization survived for millennia without BPA. It can do so again.

Can I get you to work on cel phones, too?

Anesthesia; we had millennia of excruciating surgery and got along just fine, people DIE from anesthetics, let's ban 'em, too. Antibiotics! People have died from those, too, let's ban 'em. Can't be too careful. How many people get electrocuted each year? And how many people get cancer, maybe from power lines? Ban it! Do we really need people to die so that we can have TV and wine forums?

Melamine's good, too. Three times as many babies have died from it so far as from Laura Bush's car.

[Jenise]

Melamine's good, too. Three times as many babies have died from it so far as from Laura Bush's car.

Great comeback!

Stuart,

You are an engineer. You know how cost/benefit analysis works.

There are plenty of alternatives to BPA for food containers. Nobody dies or is injured if we stop using BPA. It is an entirely different situation from anaesthetics or antibiotics, as I'm sure you well know.

Please stop dragging Fox TV debating techniques into these discussions. I'm getting tired of it.

-Paul W.

To bring some science into the debate, has anyone looked at this recent study, one of the first to find a noticeable effect in humans?
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/300/11/1303
They claim the 1455 participants were "adjusted for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, income, smoking, body mass index, waist circumference, and urinary creatinine concentration," and that higher BPA concentrations were strongly correlated with heart problems. I know, it's not like it's a prospective, double-blind study where we expose people to BPA and see if they croak, but it's still pretty scary. I don't need a Nalgene bottle, I can get something else, but I worry about the presence in canned food where the plastic is heated to the boiling point of water.

Walt

P.S. Tangent: Why is it unethical to run a study where you expose people to BPA to see what happens, but apparently ethical for the manufacturers of food containers to expose people to BPA and not bother to check what happens?

P.S. Tangent: Why is it unethical to run a study where you expose people to BPA to see what happens, but apparently ethical for the manufacturers of food containers to expose people to BPA and not bother to check what happens?

Because one is Science while the other is Commerce. You know which is more important, don't you?

Why is it unethical to run a study where you expose people to BPA to see what happens, but apparently ethical for the manufacturers of food containers to expose people to BPA and not bother to check what happens?

Disagree strongly with the assumption. I've run products through FDA extractives protocols, and presumably so did the Nalgene manufacturers if the products are sold for food contact. Now if there's solid, repeatable, and properly scaled evidence that the FDA standards need to be changed, who can argue?


Paul, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I don't watch TV, I just know that "Fox" seems to be a pejorative. In my limited exposure, it seems to be not much different than the other screaming heads networks, though I did find one guy there (their house liberal, apparently) a pretty reasonable and intelligent guy, despite having very different politics than mine.

edit: I am not an engineer. Never had any coursework in it at all. I am moderately familiar with cost-benefit analysis.

I guess the system's working about as well as it can. BPA doesn't kill people in droves or anything like that. Whatever the effects are, they're subtle and hard to gauge and it will probably be many more years before we know with any certainty what's really going on. It was not unreasonable to use it in bottles, but now that it appears that there might be some potential for adverse health effects, we'll move on to something else. Sometimes these things take a long time to surface. Let's just hope it's not replaced with something worse.

Well, the problem is that if you want to ban BPA, you eliminate not just polycarbonates but also epoxy resins, polyesters and PVC (where BPA is used as a plasticizer). That removes a lot of the common polymers from everyday usage. Many of the other common polymers such as nylons, polyurethanes, polyethylene/polypropylene and polystyrene have very different physical properties that render them unsuitable for certain applications. Offhand, I am not sure what one would replace the epoxy resin lining of food cans with, as you need the combination of thermal stability and inertness to contact with food. I am sure that an alternative lining can be found, but it may not be easy.

Mark Lipton

Yeah - it will be interesting to see where it all goes from here.

[quote="Stuart Yaniger
Paul, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I don't watch TV, I just know that "Fox" seems to be a pejorative. In my limited exposure, it seems to be not much different than the other screaming heads networks, though I did find one guy there (their house liberal, apparently) a pretty reasonable and intelligent guy, despite having very different politics than mine. [/quote]

You're probably thinking of Juan Williams, who I think is the most reasonable one there (he can actually see shades of gray).

That's the guy! Love the John Waters mustache.

He's my man.

Stu,
The recent study, as reporting in the LA TImes earlier this week, evaluated people exposed to less than the FDA permitted concentration of BPA. The entire population of the study fell below the FDA standard.

They found that the upper quartile had twice the incidence of several diseases (such as diabetes and congestive heart failure) as the lower quartile. They also showed that blacks had about 50% higher concentrations than other ethnic/racial groups in the US, FWIW.

This was not a perfect study. They may not have properly corrected for other correlations that have nothing to do with BPA.

I have no need to eat or drink from containers made from #7 plastic, but I am not able to discern whether BPA is used in food products sold in Al cans. The article does say that Al soda cans are usually lined with BPA plastic film. I so rarely drink canned soda that I don't care about my exposure that way.

What I do care about is the potential exposure to my 7 year old daughter, and other children, who couldn't know better and whose parents may not or cannot know better.

There is clearly a culture among free-market advocates to always operate under the assumption that criticisms of products in the market are ideologically based. That the messangers of negative information about products must necessarily have an anti-corporate, anti-business, anti-capitalist agenda. This is a typical cognitive defense mechanism to avoid accepting challenges to ideologically ingrained thought patterns. Facts be damned. Cut the federal science budget when they deliver bad news. Or have political hacks rewrite the scientific reports to satisfy ideological expectations.

While I am not an alarmist, and I don't place BPA near the top of environmental problems, I do think the situation deserves more than a dismissive smirk. Let the scientists do the science and, as a precaution, advise parents to avoid giving their children certain products.