Studies Prove BPA Can Cross Placenta To Fetuses 234
Totes McGotes writes "From canned food to plastic bottles, Bisphenol-A seems to be cropping up everywhere, and now two new studies show that BPA freely crosses the placenta from pregnant mother to fetus. Plus, the research found that chemical transformations occur in the fetus allowing inactive BPA to be converted to the active form."
Re:Aaaand... (Score:3, Informative)
It's a chemical used in many crystal-clear hard plastics. Like water bottles and baby bottles. Don't remember what it does to you - rots your brain or something.
Re:Aaaand... (Score:2, Informative)
It feminizes, IIRC.
Re:Great description (Score:5, Informative)
Bisphenol-A (Score:3, Informative)
After a little digging I find that it is suspected in everything from breast cancer to obesity in children. It has been suspected as being bad sense the 1930's but there is no direct link to it causing any notable issues.
So in 80+ years of research the best they can come up with is "There may be an issue with Bisphenol-A"
It also seems to me that in 3 generations we would have seen a difference or at a minimum science should be able to say "It causes XXX"
Sort of (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enough with the "Proof" (Score:5, Informative)
There has been quite a bit of scientific literature regarding BPA - see the links from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Better Article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The endocrine disruptor scam (Score:4, Informative)
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] you remember it wrong. And it wasn't the '90s, it was two years ago.
Also, later in the wiki article it says there's a link between BPA and both obesity and drug abuse.
Re:Aaaand... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, they're all bad.
Say what now? Nylon? Polyethylene? Nothing bad about them at all.
As a rule, it's usually the additives and trace chemicals from production that cause problems. All plastics are large chain molecules (and thus not absorbed by the body) and most are quite stable and do not break into monamers that could very easily (which is why most plastics are not biodegradable, and the very reason they are used).
Re:Bisphenol-A (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, while in no way implicating BPA, in the average age of puberty has been dropping in Western countries for the past 170 years (since the 1840s according to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]). The disparity seems to correlate at least in part, to industrialization; the shift started later in Japan (1945), but progressed more rapidly (dropping by 11 months per decade, instead of 4 months per decade in Europe). In 1840, the average age of first menstruation was 17, in France, 15.3. Nowadays, either age would be considered quite late; typical onset of menstruation is now around age 11.75 worldwide; 12.5 in the U.S.
Clearly, BPA isn't responsible for the entire historical shift (what with BPA containing plastics only becoming common in the last 50 years or so); changes in diet (particularly the reduction in malnourishment levels) and activity levels (hunter gatherer groups tend to have an onset later than their diet would otherwise allow for) are responsible for some of the difference. But the increased exposure to all sorts of hormone mimicking chemicals (such as BPA) was likely responsible for some of the shift as well. The question is whether BPA is unusually damaging, whether it is possible to remove BPA and other hormone mimicking chemicals from our products and the environment without affecting us negatively in other ways, etc.
Unlike the realm of medicine, where the scientific method has been applied for to evaluate treatments more and more often in recent decades, the chemical industry remains largely untested and unregulated. People were painting their homes with lead paint and burning leaded gas in their cars and it took decades for studies to make the link to retardation and poor impulse control. For something like BPA, where the negative effects seem to be longer term and less severe than that of lead poisoning, it's not at all surprising that no one has investigated it until recently.
Timeframes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bisphenol-A (Score:3, Informative)
So in 80+ years of research the best they can come up with is "There may be an issue with Bisphenol-A"
Why is that not enough? Do you want them to force feed the stuff to a bunch of people for 30 years and compare them to the general population? Unfortunately, that is just about the only way to know for sure. Will you volunteer to be one of the people in that study? And when it is done, promise not to sue them for turning you into an obese breast-cancer infected human with no reproductive system left.
BPA is a leeches into your body at low levels over your entire lifetime. It is really hard to tell what that does. It's easy to give someone a 500% overdose and say "look, it killed them!" but how do you definitely determine what it does when nearly everyone is ingesting it, and over a very long period of time? These are called lifelong studies, and the variables are darned tough to control. The fact that there is any correlation at all is enough to say "stop putting this into your body now." Especially since the stuff that leeches BPA is just a cheaper way to manufacture the bottles. Pretty soon, nobody will remember those old stinky smelly bottles that gave your food & water a plastic taste. And we will never kno how much better off we are. I'm fine with that.
Re:Great description (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great description (Score:4, Informative)
Does it though? (Score:5, Informative)
BPA as a chemical was discovered in the 19th century and it was investigated as a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s. However, it was never pursued as a production estrogen replacement (unlike DES). The question is, why not? Try to find an answer online--it's very difficult.
My understanding is that while it appeared to act like estrogen in the test tube, it turned out to have very little measurable estrogen-like effect in humans. My understanding is based on reading I did on BPA several years ago, but I have misplaced the citations. If anyone has a link to a detailed history of the pharma research involving BPA in the early 20th century, I'd be interested to read it. The Wikipedia article, for instance, is pretty much silent on anything involving BPA before a few years ago.
Re:Bisphenol-A (Score:3, Informative)
"The first evidence of the estrogenicity of bisphenol A came from experiments on rats conducted in the 1930s, but it was not until 1997 that adverse effects of low-dose exposure on laboratory animals were first reported."
I've got one:
"Bisphenol-A causes you to develop smaller genitals."
Also, how about: "Perinatal Exposure to Low Doses of Bisphenol A Affects Body Weight,
Patterns of Estrous Cyclicity, and Plasma LH Levels" http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1240370&blobtype=pdf [nih.gov]
Any material in contact with food that has such a confirmed, physical affect should be eliminated, nothing else needed. If it was some form of medicine, fine, it has side effects. I don't want my food, or it's packaging to have medical side effects.