Monday, March 9, 2009

BPA

There's a lot of talk in my town and with the ladies I work at PS I Love You of BPA. Its found in plastics and tin cans. It can cause breast or other cancers, neurological defects, and defects of the reproductive organs and glands. The FDA has declared it safe, and its been used since 1891, but current findings have found otherwise. Even low-level dosages of BPA can have dramatic affects. Canada has banned the use of BPA in its products, but the US government has not. Certain private companies within the US publicly resolve to not use BPA in production of their products anymore. So, things are turning up, but we're not quite "there" yet.

So, how do we keep safe? I've been reading up on it, and its all quite scary. Here's one article to read (click here).

The point is, we do need to research more; we need more studies and incentives for government to take consumer safety seriously and not declare safe what they do not know is safe. One article said the government basically says chemicals are safe for us not when they're proven safe, but when nothing has been proven otherwise. While it is very expensive to figure out which of over 100,000 chemicals we use are safe or not (let alone one- BPA), cancer and other health defects are an expensive price to pay for ignorance.

So, today I'm just reading up. BPA at low levels causes infertility in mice, obesity, etc., and its in hard plastics and the linings of tin cans. Arghh. Our family goes through so many tin cans...