BPA alternative disrupts normal brain-cell growth, study says

This is simply false. If it were true, getting FDA approval for a new drug would be trivial: Just release it, and hope nobody dies.

It's kind of like trying to assure yourself that complex software has zero bugs by black-box testing it.

Also a good reason to pay cash, which was another long tradition of my people.

Is it possible to make stainless steel baby bottles?

Glass bottles for newborns as they can be easily sterilised, and be sure they have a silicone nipple that also forms the seal to the glass of the bottle.

Once they get old enough to use their own, use the playtex disposable liners. No sterilisation or cleaning required, so you only have to do the nipples, which by this age can be just soap and water.

http://www.chemicalsubstanceschimiques.gc.ca/challenge-defi/...

The Think Baby non-polycarbonate bottles appear the best for a rigid bottle, but personally I wouldn't trust something that's going to be washed extremely frequently, scrubbed with brushes or thrown in a dishwasher. You use them for up to 3-4 years, so I wouldn't trust reusing a bottle as it will age.

The playtex liners was below the detection threshold on their test, which was to put boiling water in them and then hold the temperature at 60C for 2 hours. For me that's more than safe enough for the 35C milk I'm putting in it for my kid to drink within 2 minutes.

I honestly think disposable is the way to go, because it eliminates the risk of the materials degrading. These tests are on new, not 1 year old, so the only ones that are valid in every use scenario are the disposable ones.

Aluminum is not toxic when it comes to the levels that might end up in your food. Aluminum hydroxide is an FDA approved antacid.

Aluminum cans are coated not to keep the aluminum out of your food, it's to keep acidic food from corroding the aluminum.

I wonder if those will see a comeback of sorts by the 'lets go back to the past for inspiration' folks. Not that the past does not have good things but lots of paleo things are just not that scalable... I mean, imagine all the leather we'd need..

Use stainless steel baby bottles. There are couple different companies that make them, we use Klean Kanteen. There is some plastic (the ring to tighten the nipple down) but the liquid never touches anything but stainless steel and silicone.

The transition from plastic to glass isn't that hard at all, you just have to be slightly more careful when it comes to carrying one. Simply throwing the bottle across the room to somebody becomes dangerous as compared to throwing a plastic water bottle.

This year I'll be moving to storing my leftover food in glass jars, [0] le parfait do really good ones (they are expensive but worth it in my opinion). I'm still figuring out how I will store frozen meat I get from the farm.

[0] http://www.leparfait.com/

Don't rely on intuition for toxicology. If there's one field where there's a strong lack of Science (and I mean predictive Science), that's this one. There are tons of chemical compounds that have no severe tox effects, but add a couple of carbons in the chain and you can get toxicity. Or, take chirality for example. The same exact chemical formula, but the spatial arrangement being the mirror of each other's. This caused major issues back in the 20th century, when some drugs were synthesized without chiral specificity, and led to one chiral version being harmless and effective to improve a certain condition, and the other chiral version attacking the central nervous system.

No, just don't rely on intuition there.

Disruption of these can have severe consequences.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25569640

First of all there is no "the plastic atom" they are chemically more diverse than anything in computer-land. So the concerns of polycarb plastics have no relationship with polyethylene or teflon or whatever other than coincidentally having been industrially developed around the same decades so people call them all plastics, although its actually worse than calling anything green a plant and assuming they're all the same.

Here's your analogy: Plastics are tangled up strings. Like a crazy nanoscale 3-d composite. The strings are mfgr in place by dumping a bunch of wanna-be string pieces and crazy reactive hyperactive catalyst in a form and then waiting, maybe heating, to convince the catalyst to bond wanna-be string chunks into a long string.

The mechanism or turning pieces of string into a long string is surprisingly common and boring, which is the source of the whole problem. You have a chunky molecule with a finger or whatever sticking out containing a double bond. Just a plain old boring double bond like you'd find all over the place, like unfortunately in your innards. The crazy catalyst has the unusual ability to snap open double bonds and fall off to repeat maybe a few thousand times. Then the opened double bonds sometimes snap right shut, but sometimes grab a neighbor.

Think of a clown car with 20 people squashed into it, clasping their left and right hand together, and "magically" their hands unclasp for a moment, maybe, and due to crowding, their hands snap shut on a neighbors hand instead of their own. Now instead of having 20 separate clowns in a clown car, you got a conga line of 20 attached clowns wedged into place and you can't remove just one anymore because they're all stuck together. They've polymerized into a car shaped brick with a molecular weight of about 20 clowns. So now you know why some plastics are industrially sold based on molecular weight.

The "trick" to making plastics is making a shelf stable substance, preferably liquid-ish, that won't spontaneously polymerize, but has crazy molecule sex with all its neighbors at the drop of a catalyst hat. The catalyst is like a little monster than hands out to everyone little molecule-condoms coated with superglue instead of lube. (don't take this all literally, but figuratively it kinda works) Its actually quite tricky chemistry which is why it took till the last century to really kick off plastic production "for real" rather than just screwing around.

Plastics stereotypically, on average across the field, are super boring biochemically. Pure polyethylene is about as chemically exciting and reactive as asphalt, for example. Probably because it vaguely resembles asphalt chemically, you can make synthetic oil out of little bits, and polyethylene is close to what synthetic asphalt would look like. Kinda. Unpolymerized polyethylene is just a simple flammable gas, a very close cousin of propane / butane. The reason why nobody owns a ethylene cigarette lighter or has an ethylene grill in their backyard to grill burgers is it all goes into plastics not lighters and grills... So the world is full of really boring plastics. But not all plastics are boring.

Unfortunately, BPA makes a totally awesome and non-biologically reactive plastic once it cures and links up to the neighbors in a big chunk, but by itself, uncured, its fairly nasty stuff. It really wants to grab hold of another molecule, which is awesome if it successfully grabs hold and never lets go of another BPA molecule, but kinda bad if it mistakenly grabs onto your DNA (or whatever) like a bear trap.

There are also interesting "green" implications such that if BPA based plastics ever decay, its just like dumping a tanker car of monomer out in the landfill. Kinda nasty if it ever happens. On the other hand, never breaking down is kind of ecologically nasty too. Generally speaking the "green" plastics like PLA or PE have non-toxic monomers and are not nearly as durable as the "non-green" plastics like polycarb family, speaking generally, etc.

I think people are generally hesitant when it comes to filling their bodies with unknown chemicals.

Animals avoid this by instinct (rats only eat small amounts of something they've never tasted before, in order to test its reaction in the body), humans mostly use science to try to gauge which chemicals are detrimental to the body.

Of course, as with all activities involving the human mind, sometimes it can get out of hand (eg. parents not vaccinating their child because they believe it causes autism). But, all in all, I think the fundamental resistance to filling our bodies with unknown substances is quite healthy.

Same advice as when the BPA thing first came out.

They went back to the old plastics with a different plasticizer than BPA, but it's best to just use a plastic that doesn't need a plasticizer in the first place.

Only downside is that the cap is made out of polypropylene, but polypropylene is apparently BPA, BPS, and phthalate free. (May still have other issues, of course.)

They also make baby bottles and food storage containers, if that's something you need.

Extra estrogen in a female baby is absolutely a concern.

I was part of an investigation that dosed nursing rats with BPA and investigated the effect on female offspring. I left for graduate school in polymer chemistry, but you can read the results here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/pr401027q

It's no blockbuster paper, but the whole of the evidence gathered suggests you shouldn't expose your baby to BPA just because it's female.

There's also a link between post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy (older women taking estrogen after their body ceases production) and breast/uterine cancer.

Oh, and hey, congrats! Ignore the tales of despair, raising kids owns.

"The inside of our cans are lined with a double-coated acrylic and polyester protective barrier made without BPA, BPS, BPF, BADGE or NOGE. It complies with the FDA requirements for direct food contact under the Code of Federal Regulations. You'll be glad to know that as of March 2012, all of our canned foods have this non-BPA lining."

I don't know enough to judge whether there's anything still worrisome in a "double-coated acrylic and polyester protective barrier" - but they didn't substitute BPA with BPS, at least.

That made me laugh.

but yes, it's true.

I suspect you’ve never spent time in rural peasant villages. Many rural peasants (still today, but even more in the past) eat a simple and often poorly balanced diet punctuated by occasional periods of near starvation, do demanding physical labor from an early age until their bodies break down, catch all sorts of diseases that suburban office workers are never exposed to, sometimes get serious bacterial infections when they suffer any kind of laceration, have vastly inferior treatments for pretty much every medical condition, even something simple like a broken ankle used to be permanently crippling, etc., and you find it "amazing" that life expectancy has improved?

If you want to talk about exposure to various carcinogenic compounds, any family who cooks on a wood fire in an open hearth in the middle of their house is breathing more smoke than all but the heaviest of cigarette smokers, worse than the worst air pollution Beijing has to offer.

A healthy human body clears BPA fine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2199288/

The problem is many people are getting exposed to quite a bit all day long by eating and drinking a lot of canned/bottled stuff. I wouldn't freak out about what a water bottle is made of if you don't have chronic high exposure.

More important than freaking about minor exposure is supporting a strong metabolism, immune system, and liver function. The body can clear stuff like this fine if running well. You want to be running a high metabolism on plenty of sugar and starch.

That's a ridiculously untrue statement. Try and add a chemical with unknown safety to a food product/cosmetic/medical device and see how long it takes the FDA to shut you down.

The FDA does have GRAS designation (generally recognized as safe) for many chemicals, but that is based on a large body of evidence that has demonstrated no (or manageable) safety concerns.

Count me in. I am a nutter!