You’ve heard a BPA in the news lately. BPA stands for Bisphenol A and basically it’s a compound that is fact to be what we called an endocrine disruptor because it has some properties just like estrogen is considered estrogen like and that hormone can potentially interfere with our own body’s hormones.

BPA isn't as foreign to us as some might think just because it’s been in the news BPA has been around for years and years and years. In fact 95% of people have BPA in their system because it’s everywhere. It’s in the water. It’s in the ground. As I said before it’s in the human body. But BPA is used specifically to manufacture plastics and the ecause the concern nowadays is that when you heat those plastics up whether it’s the baby bottle or even some plastic containers where you're heating over your leftover dinner from last night.

BPA can leach out of the plastic and leach right into a food or the liquid that you're heating up with. So that seems to be the concern now is the levels of BPA that is going to be found on that food or liquid and whether they have an effect on the body. But quite frankly BPA is everywhere and always has been.

Some people say it’s dangerous despite the fact that it’s found in many cases, in levels below what the government considers dangerous because they say we shouldn’t have any in our substances. It can lead to abnormal puberty development. It can lead to early menses for girls. It can lead to abnormal penis development from boys. It can lead to neuro-developmental disorders such as an increase in autism and increase in the diagnosis of ADHD. It can lead to behavioral problems. It may have an affect on developing fetuses in their brains or even infants when they have it present in the baby bottles.

And those effects can show up later in life. It can also lead to obesity, low sperm count so it has links to many different conditions mostly neurological development and that’s what so concerning in addition to the fact that you don’t seen many of those consequences until much later on life.

The federal government has an established standard for BPA and they say at this particular level if you go over it, it can potentially lead to some harmful side effects but if you center it just potentially save. Unfortunately there's a growing body of scientific evidence that says that even below that particular threshold we are seeing some of these effects especially later in life. So in general, the growing consensuses, that we really shouldn’t have any BPA in any of the substances that we address. So the answer to the question of well does some to it safe or not is let's play it safe and let's not have any BPA in our system.

Well, the very first that you can do to limit the amount of BPA that gets in your system is look for any kind of labeling that says BPA free and then you know with certainty that you're safe. The next thing is if you are reheating food in plastic containers that can be heated on the microwave remember the key is this step leaches it out of the containers when it’s heated. So you don’t want do that, you want to put your food in plate especially when you get take out from the restaurant or a leftover food in restaurants, put them on plate and heated it up in the microwave that way.

Use baby bottles that are either BPA free or if you are going to use plastic bottles don’t put those in the microwave. Heat the milk or other liquid up some other way and then put it in the bottle to minimize the leaching of the BPA. You can use metal bottles to put hot liquid in. You can use metal water bottles as oppose to the plastic water bottles that we so often use.

Bottles that are milky in color they don’t contained BPA so those are safe. The other thing that BPA does is it leaches out when bottles are scratch so make sure if you with the wear and tending of using bottles and cups throw those away so you minimize the BPA in that. And last of all when you're looking at plastics if you look on the bottom around the side there actually is a number of a plastic. So you want to avoid number seven because number seven is the plastic that contains that BPA. So you choose one, two, or four some others.