How to Avoid Bisphenol A

You're water bottle may be poisoning you. The food you're eating may have dangerous toxicity levels. These are all things we've been hearing lately about Bisphenol A, or BPA.

BPA is a widely used chemical. It is used in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. It has many attractive qualities, which make it popular in many products. BPA is clear, tough, formable, and adheres well to many surfaces.

With all these attributes it's used extensively in lining canned goods, like canned food and drinks. It's also perfect for making tough, clear water bottles. Food containers and even the plastic used to wrap a pound of hamburger have BPA in them.

The BPA website states rather convincingly that BPA is considered safe for the micro amounts consumed by humans.

But if you want to avoid ingesting BPA, there are steps you can take to limit your intake.

• Take a look at your plastic products. If they have the recycle code #7, they have BPA in them. Use numbers 1, 2,4 and 5 instead.
• Don't use Styrofoam
• BPA is used to coat the inside of canned foods. So whenever possible try to use fresh fruit and vegetables, not canned.
• If you have leftover food in a plastic container, don't heat the food in the microwave without first transferring it to a microwave safe ceramic plate or bowl. Heated up plastic is more likely to leach BPA and who know what other toxins.
• To avoid the plastic wrapped meats, consider buying your meat directly from a butcher. They normally wrap the meat in paper. If you don't trust the coating of the paper, bring your own. Taking this one step farther, buy a portion of a cow, or whatever meat you're into and stock your fridge with fresh meat wrapped in paper. This not only gets rid of the BPA but you also get higher quality meat.
• Turn in your plastic water bottle for a stainless steel water bottle that isn't coated with BPA. There are also plastic water bottles that state they contain no BPA. Of course these water bottles are relatively expensive. Have the prices recently shot up? I wonder.

It's tough to get away from BPA all together, it's a huge part of many products we consume and use, but by following the above points you can greatly reduce your exposure level.

Whether or not you believe BPA is safe, the less non-natural toxins you take into your body...the better.