EWG’s Tips to avoid BPA exposure

By Lisa Frack

May 28, 2009

EWG is working hard to pass laws that limit or ban the dangerous chemical bisphenol-A (BPA).

But until they pass, we think you should have the latest info on sources of exposure and our tips to avoid them on your own. Because before the personal becomes political it’s, well, still personal.

Who’s affected by BPA??

1. The developing fetus and baby are the most vulnerable to BPA’s toxic effects. Unfortunately they also have the most intense BPA exposure of any age group.
   Many parents who have replaced their polycarbonate baby bottles are unaware that BPA contaminates liquid baby formula sold in metal cans. Since formula can make up 100% of a baby’s diet over her first 6 months of life, parents should choose BPA-free types.
2. Adults ingest much less BPA than babies. But a recent study linking BPA exposures in adults to heart disease and diabetes raises concerns about the safety of current exposures.
   Adult exposure comes primarily from canned foods and polycarbonate food containers, but BPA-containing medical devices could also be a source. Pregnant women and older children should avoid BPA. Eat a varied diet, avoid canned foods, and don’t use polycarbonate plastics for warm food or drinks.

How are we exposed??
EWG Senior Scientist Olga Naidenko wrote a recent post here on Enviroblog summarizing all the ways we can be exposed to BPA.

In short, BPA has countless uses, several of which have been highlighted as an exposure risk. BPA is a component of non-metal dental fillings, it is in thermal paper for many receipts, and it is increasingly used in medical devices. There is little research about the magnitude of exposures from these products.

EWG’s Tips for avoiding BPA
Although completely eliminating exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) may not be possible, there are steps you can take to reduce your family’s exposure to this chemical by avoiding common sources and limiting exposure for the highest risk groups.

• BPA in formula and baby bottles: Check our BabySafe guide to bottles and formula and a previous Enviroblog post specifically about choosing and using infant formula safely.
• BPA in canned foods: Almost all canned foods sold in the United States have a BPA-based epoxy liner that leaches BPA into the food. EWG tested 97 canned foods and found detectable levels of BPA in more than half of the foods. The highest concentrations were in canned meats, pasta and soups. Only 1 manufacturer claims to use no BPA. Eden Foods uses an alternative technology for canned beans but not for its tomato-based products. Pregnant women and children should limit their consumption of canned foods to avoid BPA. Rinsing canned fruit or vegetables may reduce the amount of BPA you ingest.
• BPA in water and food containers: Less BPA leaches from plastic water bottles and food containers than from cans into canned foods and baby formula. Nevertheless it is good to take simple precautions to reduce your exposure.

  Polycarbonate plastics are rigid, transparent and used for food storage containers and water bottles, among other things. Trace amounts of BPA can migrate from these containers, particularly if used for hot food or liquids. Soft or cloudy-colored plastic does not contain BPA.

  When possible, avoid polycarbonate, especially for children’s food and drinks. This plastic might be marked with the recycling code #7 or the letters "PC". Plastics with the recycling labels #1, #2 and #4 on the bottom are better choices because they do not contain BPA. Avoid putting any plastic containers in microwaves. Wash plastics on the top shelf of your dishwasher or by hand.
  Some metal water bottles lined with an epoxy-based enamel coating could leach BPA. Look for stainless steel bottles that do not have a liner. Avoid using old and scratched plastic bottles.

And keep your eyes on Enviroblog and your inbox for upcoming e-advocacy on BPA legislation. We plan to beat this chemical at home and in the halls of Congress.

We caught Coca-Cola and Del Monte plotting to deceive you about the dangers of BPA.

This is from the Environmental Working Groups’ Eviroblog

We caught Coca-Cola and Del Monte plotting to deceive you about the dangers of BPA.
Last week food and chemical lobbyists met in Washington, DC to save BPA – they’re desperate to block state and federal efforts to regulate their $6 billion industry.
We were shocked when we read internal meeting minutes that revealed an unethical strategy to keep your family eating and drinking from BPA-laden containers. To get the full story, see our Enviroblog.

QUESTION: Which of these tactics did BPA industry lobbyists concoct?

1. Employing fear tactics like threatening consumers with limited access to affordable baby food.
2. Using a "pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA" as their ‘holy grail’ spokesperson.
3. Focusing fear tactics on historically exploited populations including "Hispanic and African Amercians and the poor."
4. "Befriending people that are able to manipulate the legislative process."
5. All of the above.

ANSWER: (E) All of the above. Ready to fight back? So are we.

Call now to demand no BPA

Coca-Cola: 1-800-GET-COKE, ext. 2
Del Monte: 1-800-543-3090

Sample script:

"Hello, My name is ______________. I’m shocked and disappointed in your unethical approach to business when it comes to BPA – placing profits ahead of my family’s health and using fear tactics to placate consumers about a clearly dangerous chemical. BPA needs to go – NOW. Thank you."

After you call. . .

1. Tell us about it. Send EWG an email describing the conversation.
2. Get your friends to call. Use our tell-a-friend to ask your friends to call today.
3. Donate to EWG so we can keep these big corporations from profiting off your family’s health.

Thank you for calling. Now the BPA industry lobbyists know that yet another consumer will not stand for their unethical tactics.

Reprieve

June 2, 2009, 9:38 pm

By Tim Kreider

Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and it’s not the point of this essay. The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.

Winston Churchill’s quote about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes — in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rockets — until he emerges flayed of all his free-floating guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.  I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print.

I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.

My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day — a loud, raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm and makes people in bars or restaurants look over at me for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.

I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.

It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill, and then to my mother after he died; an almost literal lightening, a flippant indifference to the silly, quotidian nonsense that preoccupies most of us and ruins so much of our lives. A neighbor was suing my father for some reason or other during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such “serious” matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird In a Gilded Cage” in a high, quavering old-man falsetto. When my mother, who’s now a leader in her church, sees people squabbling over minutiae or personal politics, she reminds them, diplomatically I’m sure, to focus on the larger context.

It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than a sort of hysterical high. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace.

It didn’t last, of course. You can’t feel grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever — or grieve forever, for that matter. Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world. Before a year had gone by the same dumb everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I’d be disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night wondering what was going to become of me.

Once a year on my stabbiversary I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a free round. But now that I’m back down in the messy, tedious slog of everyday emotional life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgent, pressing items on our mental lists — taxes, car repairs, our careers, the headlines — are so much idiot noise, and that what matters is spending time with people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes.

I was not cheered, a few years ago, to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

Here is the link to his website- The Pain Comics

Let the Kid Be

From the NYTimes today…

May 31, 2009

By LISA BELKIN

Perhaps you know it by its other names: helicoptering, smothering mothering, alpha parenting, child-centered parenting. Or maybe there’s a description you’ve coined on your own but kept to yourself: Overly enmeshed parenting? Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting? My-own-mother-never-breast-fed-me-so-I-am-never-going-to-let-my-kid-out-of-my-sight parenting?

There are, similarly, any number of theories as to why 21st-century mothers and fathers feel compelled to micromanage their offspring: these are enlightened parents, sacrificing their own needs to give their children every emotional, intellectual and material advantage; or floundering parents, trying their best to navigate a changing world; or narcissistic parents, who see their children as both the center of the universe and an extension of themselves.

But whatever you call it, and however it began, its days may be numbered. It seems as though the newest wave of mothers is saying no to prenatal Beethoven appreciation classes, homework tutors in kindergarten, or moving to a town near their child’s college campus so the darling can more easily have home-cooked meals. (O.K., O.K., many were already saying no, but now they’re doing so without the feeling that a good parent would say yes.) Over coffee and out in cyberspace they are gleefully labeling themselves “bad mommies,” pouring out their doubts, their dissatisfaction and their dysfunction, celebrating their own shortcomings in contrast to their older sisters’ cloying perfection.

After all, that is the way it is with parenting — which I bet was never used as a verb before the 20th century, when medicine reached the point where parents could assume their babies would survive. At its core, raising children is about instinct and biology, yes, but on top of that, we build an artificial scaffold, which supports what we have come to think of as parenting truths but are really only parenting trends.

Going way back, the Spartans probably thought they were oh, so modern when they left defenseless infants on wild mountain slopes. So did wealthy Norse mothers who had poor women foster their children, and European aristocrats who employed wet nurses. More recently, as Ann Hulbert chronicles in her book “Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children,” rigid feeding schedules were all the rage in the United States in the 1920s. The next two decades brought an emphasis on discipline.

In 1946, Dr. Spock came along and told parents to trust their instincts. Later, parents became buddies with their kids, and by the end of the last century, the debate was about the quality versus the quantity of time spent with your children. That was followed by the concept of mothering as an all-consuming identity. Mothers chose their gurus — T. Berry Brazelton (touchy-feely parenting), William Sears (attachment parenting) and John Rosemond (Christian parenting) — then diligently wore their babies in slings and nursed them into toddlerhood, all the while judging (and feeling judged by) those who did not do the same.

After a decade of earnest immersion in parenting, though, the times are ripe for a change. The first sign was the wave of confessionals — from anonymous Web sites like truumomconfessions​.com (where mothers admit to transgressions like feigning stomach cramps to steal quiet time hiding in the bathroom) to bylined blogs like the wildly popular dooce.com (where Heather B. Armstrong chronicled her postpartum depression and continues to write about her struggles as the mother of a charming but somewhat high-strung 5-year-old) to memoirs like Ayelet Waldman’s (in which she cops to such “sins” as using disposable diapers and loving her husband more than her children).

But in the past few months, a second wave has taken hold — writers are moving past merely venting and are trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement. Carl Honoré is one. He calls it “slow parenting” — no more rushing around physically and metaphorically, no more racing kids from soccer to Suzuki. Lenore Skenazy is another. She calls it “free-range parenting,” a return to the days when childhood was not ruled by the fear (overblown, she says, with statistics to prove it) that children would be maimed, kidnapped or killed if they did something as simple as riding their bikes alone to the park.

By far the most chipper is Tom Hodgkinson, whose book “The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids” was just published in England, and whose cover — Mum and Dad lounging with martinis while their well-trained toddler sits on the floor mixing up the next batch — illustrates his message that parents should just chill. Pay attention to your own needs, he writes, back off on your children and everyone will be happier and better adjusted.

All this certainly dovetails nicely with new economic realities. When you can’t afford those violin lessons or a baby sitter to accompany your 10-year-old to the park, you can turn guilt on its head and call it a parenting philosophy. But is it fundamental change? Or is the apparent decline of overparenting (and its corollaries: feelings of competition and inadequacy) actually the same obsession donning a new disguise?

The one constant over the past century has been parents’ determination to find the right answers when it comes to raising their children. In this latest chapter, we have replaced the experts who told us what a good parent worries about with experts who tell us that a good parent doesn’t worry so much. We may even see parents stop aiming to prove how perfect they are and start trying to prove how nonchalant they are. But worry is worry. The search to keep from messing up goes on.

Lisa Belkin, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes The Times’s Motherlode blog.