Mountains of evidence funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has demonstrated over and over again that bisphenols like BPA are dangerous. And who agrees? The American Academy of Pediatrics. Shockingly, weeks ago the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) held a press conference to say that “BPA is safe!” The problem with this is they are very wrong. The FDA is using scientific principles from the 16th century and old technology to analyze chemicals and it’s putting the American people in danger. We at Mamavation have watched this closely, and while we were not surprised by the outcome, and are very fed up with how the FDA evaluates chemicals for safety. And because of that, we’ve decided to petition the Congress for their help banning bisphenols, like BPA. You can support the petition here. You’ve trusted Mamavation to cover issues like how Target receipts contain a chemical linked to weight gain, how BPA has been linked to obesity in children, and which diapers and baby wipes are the safest based on ingredients, now join us and sign this petition demanding that the Congress ban bisphenols once and for all.
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Sign the #BanBPA Petition To Tell Your Congressional Representative You Want Your Family Protected
It’s time to stop relying on the FDA to do their job and take matters into our own hands. Care2 has partnered with us to utilize their platform and we just launched a petition with Care2 to pressure Congress to ban bisphenols like BPA. Make sure to sign this petition and share. Stick around and I’ll fill you in on all the reasons why you should sign this petition, share it with all your friends and join with us to make this a reality.
The FDA Is Getting in the Way of Banning BPA. The Evidence is Overwhelming. Demand Congress Bypass Them and Ban.
The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is getting in the way of banning a dangerous chemical class around pregnant women and children called bisphenols. The methods the FDA is using to evaluate whether a chemical is safe for pregnant women and children are incredibly flawed. Not only has the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) come out strongly stating they believe the bisphenol chemical class is potentially harming pregnant women and children, and they believe that Congress needs to take some sort of action to help, but independent scientists are also concerned. This is why we asked Dr. Pete Myers of Environmental Health Sciences to talk with us about bisphenols. And Dr. Myers made some very important points that you can discover here.
Dr. Pete Myers is a Ph.D. biologist who co-wrote best selling book Our Stolen Future with Theo Colborn and Dianne Dumanoski and then in 2003 founded Environmental Health News. Pete is passionate about biology, photography, nature and democratizing science for consumers. He’s received accolades from both the National Institutes of Health and the Endocrine Society. The Endocrine Society is the largest scientific and medical association for research scientists and physicians who are versed in scientific and medical insights about endocrinology, including endocrine disruption. Today, he’s involved in both lab work and the communication of its findings, a maverick with many talents so to speak. Pete Myers holds a doctorate in the biological sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. For a dozen years beginning in 1990, Dr. Myers served as Director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. And while at the foundation, he helped found the science of endocrine disruption close to 30 years ago with his now-late colleague Theo Colborn.
He made frequent contributions to my book Green Enough: Eat Better, Live Cleaner, Be Happier (All Without Driving Your Family Crazy!). Below you’ll find some main points.
Feds Don’t Do Low Dose Testing. Therefore, They Don’t Know.
The FDA assumes that high dose testing will tell them everything they need to know about low dose testing without doing it. So they do the high dose testing and then extrapolate what they think will happen at low doses. But they don’t actually do the test at low doses. While that works with some poisons, it emphatically doesn’t for endocrine disrupting compounds. And that’s because different genes get turned on and off at different parts of the dose response curve. What happens at low doses can be just the opposite of what happens at high doses. And because of the way they structure their tests, they never dose at the low levels that are relevant to most people’s experience. SHOCKER! (That was probably immature of me.)
Pete has written multiple scientific (and peer-reviewed) papers on this. You can find two of them here and . And when he published the second one the country’s top toxicologist, Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences wrote concluding that this should be the general expectation for endocrine disrupting compounds. Should low dose testing be considered? I guess it depends on what your interpretation of “safe” is. If you don’t want to know, don’t test. If you don’t test low doses, you definitely won’t understand their impacts.
Feds Only Consider Active Ingredients, Not Whole Formulation
When the Feds test pesticides, they only test the active ingredient. They aren’t looking at our real world exposure of a complete formulation, just certain ingredients inside. And that is also completely absurd. It’s like testing the tomatoes in a spaghetti sauce but missing the oils, herbs, and other ingredients. Refusing to test the entire formulation means they don’t know how it’s reacting with your body as it’s sold or applied. The actual product contains a complex mixture of other chemicals that are included specifically to make the active ingredient more toxic. And it’s not just pesticides that have this problem. We live in a soup of nasties that can interact in ways that dramatically make the mixture more dangerous than just one chemical. Is this toxic soup safe? I guess it depends on what your interpretation of “safe” is. If you don’t want to know, don’t test the products the way families experience them in their homes.
Feds Utilize Old Technology And Need An Upgrade!
The tests FDA use are way out of date. The Feds rely on antiquated testing compared to the tools that independent scientists use when examining toxicity. Here’s Pete’s analogy–Imagine you’re an FDA employee and you’ve just seen photographs in National Geographic of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. You’ve never seen anything like it. So what do you do? You grab your binoculars and go into your backyard at night, look up toward the stars, and see nothing like those photographs. You don’t see anything so you conclude the photographs are FAKE NEWS. One of the crude tests the EPA and FDA use was actually developed in the 1930s. In case they didn’t know, medical science has advanced a lot since 1935. Their tests are totally insensitive to what we need to know about endocrine disrupting chemicals. To determine what is “safe” you need to use modern medical tools. Not surprisingly, they aren’t finding anything, so they are able to say “no danger here!” But does that mean they are right? I guess this depends on what your interpretation of “safe” is.
First Human Trial of BPA Demonstrates Serious Potential For Harm of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals
Bisphenols are a chemical class that is linked to a plethora of medical problems and diseases. Most of this research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by very reputable scientists all over the United States. They’ve found these chemicals are particularly dangerous to pregnant women and small children. But the research has not found its way into setting policy and that’s a problem. Part of the argument not to take research on bisphenols seriously is that it’s only tested on animals or cell cultures, which does not necessarily translate into real human outcomes. But all this has changed now. The first human trial of bisphenols was just released and it’s now established a potential link to the rise in Type 2 Diabetes. Now more studies need to be done on humans in order to establish these links.
Prior to this first human trial, there were no approved standards for testing on humans outside the pharmaceutical realm. But a very savvy researcher found a way to incorporate humans into research without exposing them to anything higher than what they would normally be exposed to daily. In order to do this, he instructed each subject with how to avoid bisphenols in their everyday lives and then dosed them with the amount of bisphenols they would have had daily. The differences between the subjects are what he used to establish the study. No pregnant women were used for this study. And obviously, it begs to be repeated by other scientists to establish a firmer link.
Tips for Avoiding Bisphenols Every Day
Avoiding bisphenols can be complicated but very worth the effort when you are pregnant or have young children at home. Bisphenols can be found in three basic areas: thermal receipt paper, plastic food & beverage containers, & canned food lining. Here’s the trifecta of how to avoid the Bisphenols.
- Stop touching thermal receipt paper. Signing without touching them is complicated, but can be done if you place your covered arm on them then scribble. An example of a store with bisphenol coated thermal receipt paper is Target.
- Stop drinking water or eating food from plastic containers. Use stainless steel, glass & tetrapak instead. Click here for recommendations on products.
- Stop eating canned foods OR drinking sodas from cans. Look for alternatives stored in glass or tetrapak.
Now is the time to start discussing a ban on all bisphenols. Join us as we petition Congress to get this dangerous chemical out of the industry so we no longer need to be exposed to it daily.
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