Plastics make it possibleFollow

Sounds like this is right up Ari's alley.

Plastics appear to be the cause of a lot of the chronic maladies that are cropping up nowadays. Its like pewter back in the dark ages: everyone uses it, its convenient, and it will be tough to adjust to not using it as much. I think they should switch to a lot more glass use. Glass is easily recycled, and is made of natural materials that are not harmful to the body (except on a short-term physical basis if you get cut by it).

Our children get teh smart and healthie, Yank trailer-trash accelerate darwinism.

win:win

Still trying to get back at us over the whole tea-bag thing, eh.

Coffee > tea.

Something tells me that I'm likely to feed them worse things as they grow up, such as McD's (or any fast food), children's marketed food, etc...


I might pay a little more attention to this once it gets past "linked to" status.

Edited, Sep 16th 2008 3:50pm by Uglysasquatch

One of the most moving pictures ever posted here.

Nexa

You only think that because your coffee is full of salt.

If I were more of the tinfoil hat disposition, I'd say the BPA hysteria is being generated by the plastic manufacturers to force us to spend money on overpriced BPA-free replacements of stuff we already own.

And yes, I got rid of my BPA bottles. Babies-R-Us was taking them back and giving store credit when you turned in the BPA-containing bottles, so I took all my bottles in. Even though I'd bought them separately, they would only refund me the price of having purchased them in a 3-pack.

Avent is the brand of bottle I was using, but apparently it's a popular enough brand that now that Avent has come out with BPA-free bottles, they can't keep them on the shelf. So I had to get the Born Free bottles, which are about the same price as the Avent bottles (when they are in stock) but have a much more complicated venting system. And to top it all off, the BPA-free bottles are about twice the price of the old bottles. A single old-style Avent bottle is around $6--the BPA-free version is $11. A 3-pack of the 11oz old-style bottles was $13, a 2-pack of the 8oz BPA-free bottles (apparently they are no longer making 11oz bottles, nor is Avent packaging them in 3-packs any longer) is $19.

What's more, the store credit can only be used for purchasing bottles. So it's not like I could decide I would make do with his stainless-steel sippy bottle and use the store credit on a couple new pairs of pajamas for the winter. Nope, I took in four 4oz bottles, five 8oz bottles and three 11oz bottles and emerged with three 8oz bottles and enough credit for two more if I ever catch them when they are restocked.

This is where the [::motz::] smiley would be if I had premium.

(and yes, he is still about 50% breastfed, but he gets a bottle in the evening to fill in the empty corners and also he gets bottles when someone else is watching him.)

Edited, Sep 16th 2008 12:58pm by Ambrya

No, they don't.

BPA is a coating put on plastics and metals. It is analogous to lead in glass in this sense: it is not necessary and both seem to be dangerous, although the danger of lead is quite well known, our glorious leader in the US appointed a pediatrician who literally did not believe in lead poisoning to a position of prominence within the regulatory apparatus, as I posted here at that time.

The truth is complex, and requires study. Glass, plastic, stainless steel: probably fine but the coatings upon them may kill you...best not to oversimplify when dealing with what is effectively medical advice.

If this issue concerns or just interests you, the best starting point I know about is the book called Our Stolen Future, by Colborn, Dumanoski and Peterson. (Two scientists and a reporter.) The book is simply written, for laypeople, and set out as a narrative about some real-life people as a hook for talking about scientific discoveries, so it's an interesting read that doesn't bore you half way through. For people who like to know that they are getting REAL information, the last 33 pages of Notes are devoted to a reference list of original sources in Peer-reviewed science and medical journals and stand-alone published studies. Our Stolen Future has a related website with links to many articles and studies, here. I recommend bookmarking it for later perusal if you are interested in the subject, it's too large to take in all at once.

The broad issue is about Xenohormones, small, fat-soluble molecules that have chemical structures close to human and animal hormone molecules. Xenohormones are sometimes very problematic because their "close but not exact" mimicking of human/animal hormones means that they are highly reactive inside humans and animals, but don't do the job that hormones are supposed to do properly, leading to a wide range of health and fertility problems. There is now a concern that a large percentage of chemicals derived from Crude oil are xenohormonal in nature.

The biggest new scientific concern is that it now turns out that the health problems of synthetic chemicals don't scale up in a linear way with the size of the dose, as was previously thought. So that present regulations for the cutoff point for safe, allowable concentrations of a chemical may actually be hopelessly inadequate.

There IS something that can be done about this. Individual products don't need to be tested, but individual materials (that are derived from crude oil) should all be tested for xenohormonal activity via fast standardised pathology tests. Materials that fail the tests should be banned from future manufacture and sale, in the same way that DDT and asbestos are now banned. An example of how a material might be tested for xenohormonal activity is a test that determines if a material is a xenoestrogen (acts like oestrogens in humans and animals.) The material is put in a petri-dish with some breast-cancer cells. If the breast-cancer cells multiply and grow, the material is a strong xenoestrogen.

After a period of years, perhaps decades, of going through all crude-oil derived materials, we'll have a suite, a long list, of materials that are hormonally safe for humans to use, and safe to dispose of into the environment, and a suite of now banned substances. Not all plastics and not all synthetic food and bathroom product additives are xenohormones. The problem for today's consumers is we don't know which ones are and which ones aren't. There may possibly also be a third suite of allowed substances that come with a safety rule of no human skin contact, or ingestion.

If you would like to do something personal about the issue, after deciding for yourself whether this is all a crock of **** or not, you could write or email to your political Representative, saying, "I am concerned about the issue of Xenohormones, and I would like all crude-oil derived materials to be tested for Xenohormonal activity, and I would like all crude-oil derived materials that turn out to be hormonally active to be banned from future manufacture or sale."

As for glass baby bottles, they were used for decades all over the world. The biggest advantage of plastic baby bottles when they arrived was not that they noticeably broke less often, but that they were noticeably lighter than the glass bottles.

If you don't like the idea of glass, go with something else (that isn't coated in a plasticizer.) Personally, I wouldn't go with any plastic for a baby that hasn't been tested for xenohormonal activity.

Edited, Sep 17th 2008 1:55am by Aripyanfar

Huh. Mia was at least 2 before we started beating her.

pubmed turns up seven entries for xenohormone and it's plural. That is quite low. I read the one by Davis Telang Osborne and Bradlow (I think it should be free for anyone to read online, just google pubmed, follow link, search for xenohormoes (plural), it should turn up). I did not read the other six, but this one is basically a pure hypothesis paper, no data, just a possible pathway. That doesn't mean it is wrong.

Edit: searching pubmed for bisphenol A turns up 4778 entries. BPA turns up just under 2000.

Edited, Sep 17th 2008 8:45am by yossarian

Okay. "An endocrine disrupter is defined as “an exogenous substance that causes adverse health effects in an intact organism, or its progeny, consequent to changes in endocrine function” [8]. EDCs constitute, therefore, a class of substances which is not defined by chemical nature but by biological effect [9]. Thus, a wide variety of pollutants which have been reported to disrupt normal pathways in animals, including pesticides [10], polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [11], phthalate plasticizers [12], certain polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, furans, alkylphenols, synthetic steroids, and natural products such as phytoestrogens, are collectively referred to as EDCs [1, 13 and 14]."

This is from an article by: Maria J. López de Alda and Damià Barceló in Journal of Chromatography A, an article I picked at semi-random.

This is not just plastics, but a broad variety of chemicals. Will follow up later when I have more time.