BPA: What You Need to Know

If you were to ask your grandparents, or even great-grandparents, about what has happened to kids today, they might give some off-handed comment about there being too many hormones in food. Unfortunately, these statements hold truth to them, and one such hormone that is nearly unavoidable is bisphenol-A, or BPA for short.

    BPA is a very common compound, and it’s very widely used in a myriad of plastic products. BPA is used in water bottles, plastic cookware and dishes, sports equipment, DVDs, water pipes, and as a coating in most forms of food packaging. The benefits to BPA as a plastic are that it’s sturdy and doesn’t break easily, which is exactly why the company Nalgene was making their shatter resistant water bottles out of it. This makes the plastic so useful that it now shows up nearly everywhere you turn, but after some severe scrutiny and analysis by several reputable publications, and by both the FDA and the European Food Safety Authority, it turns out that BPA can be extremely detrimental to health, even at levels approved by the FDA.

    In an article written by Adam Hinterthuer and published in Scientific American back in 2008, some of the backstory behind BPA is revealed. BPA began being synthesized as a plastic in 1891, and as an alternative to estrogen in the 1930’s. The article specifically takes an introspective look at how one geneticist came to learn about how harmful BPA actually is. Patricia Hunt was working with laboratory mice, studying reproductive complications, when she went to check on her control group and came to find that the janitor had accidentally used a more concentrated cleaner for the cages and let BPA leach into the cages containing the mice. Hunt found that an astounding 40% of the mice in her control group ended up having egg defects as a direct cause of the chemical being released.

    The full article goes into more detail about the scrutiny of just how bad BPA might be, considering that evidence of effects on humans is very hard to derive, and even today studies about the effects of BPA are being conducted. One glaring fact remains certain: BPA, when heated, will come off of plastic and essentially get onto whatever touches it. This means that it gets into nearly everything, especially water bottles which use BPA plastics. BPA, as was stated earlier, was used as a synthetic estrogen, and still acts like a synthetic estrogen when introduced in the body. What is important to remember is that BPA does not act like a toxin, where the more you ingest, the worse it is for you. BPA acts very much like a hormone, and the human endocrine system, especially in young children, is very delicate and tightly regulated by our own bodies. The article in Scientific American states that in lab rodents, BPA was shown to have an effect at as low as 20 micrograms per kilogram, which is a third of what the FDA considers safe for human consumption. 

    What’s even more unfortunate for consumers is the false promise behind such advertisements as “BPA free”. Companies can very easily switch the plastic for related plastics such as bisphenols-S and -F. In another related article in Scientific American by Jenna Bilbrey in 2014, BPS is shown to have just as bad, if not worse, effects in organisms tested. One such experiment, performed by Deborah Kurrasch from the University of Calgary, was performed on zebra fish. Zebra fish have similar brain development to humans, and when introduced to BPA and BPS, neuronal growth increased dramatically, by as much as 170% in fish introduced to BPA and 240% in fish introduced to BPS. It was found that a very low dose – 1000 times less than what is recommended for regular human consumption – had that very effect on the fish. Other reviews of literature on the subject of BPS and BPF, as performed by Johanna R. Rochester and Ashley L. Bolden, “are as hormonally active as BPA, and they have endocrine-disrupting effects.”

    It might be unavoidable, but one thing people can do to try and stay away from BPA and its siblings is invest in glass dishware and avoid plastic that might come in direct contact with your mouth. Another recommended course of action is to stay away from plastic bottled beverages, especially including bottled water, as much as possible. Granted, the true effects of BPA on humans is still being researched, but all signs point to it being very bad for people. For more information on exactly how bad, visit Dr. Darla Wise during office hours, or look into BPA on research databases at the library to find helpful articles and pertinent research.