Is Plastic Making Us Fat?

Interesting article in the Boston Globe recently linking prenatal exposure to chemicals found in everyday plastics to obesity later in life:

Animal studies in recent years raise the possibility that prenatal exposure to minuscule amounts of common chemicals - found in everything from baby bottles to toys - could predispose a body to a life of weight gain. The chemicals, known as endocrine disrupters, mimic natural hormones that help regulate, for example, how many fat cells a body makes and how much fat to store in them.

A recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 93 percent of the US population had bisphenol A, a chemical that can be found in canned goods and in hard, clear plastic items such as baby bottles and hiking containers, in their body. A study at the University of Missouri-Columbia showed that mice fed bisphenol A during early development - at lower amounts than what would have resulted in the levels found in most people in the CDC study - become markedly more obese as adults than those that weren’t fed the chemical. Tufts University scientists observed similar phenomenon in rats.

And just to make you feel a little worse about it, bisphenol A has already been previously linked to causing breast cancer, testicular cancer, diabetes, hyperactivity, obesity, low sperm counts, miscarriage and a host of other reproductive failures in laboratory animals. Here in the USA, exposure of up to 50 µg/kg/day (50 ppb/day) of bisphenol A is considered safe by the EPA. Which would be great if it weren’t for the fact that negative health effects have been found to occur at exposures as low as .025 µg/kg/day.

Strangely enough, the American Chemistry Council maintains that Bisphenol A makes “our lives easier, healthier and safer, each and every day” and spent $28,000,000 from 1998-2004 lobbying politicians to agree with that opinion. Looks like it was money well spent.