news

And you thought plastic was safe

When I was in college, Nalgene bottles were THE thing to keep your water in. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was fun to throw them from the 10th floor window to see if it was REALLY true that they were unbreakable. Maybe it was the cool colors. Who knows.

Now–six years later– we learn that not only do they suck, but they are bad for our health.

The LA Times (my new place of work on Mon and Tues) did a story about the danger of plastic. Here’s the main point:

“The first large-scale human study of a chemical widely used in plastic products, including baby bottles and tin can linings, found double the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver problems in people with the highest concentrations in their urine, British researchers reported Tuesday.

The findings confirm earlier results obtained in animals, increasing pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to limit use of the chemical Bisphenol A, commonly called BPA.”

AWESOME.

While it concerns me a little that it is in things like sunglasses, it is really worrisome that some stupid trend while I was in college could have cost me my health. These days, there is a replacement “cool water bottle” (it’s aluminum, I think) I think I’ll pass on the whole thing. Maybe I’ll just drink from rivers… or something.

1 thought on “And you thought plastic was safe”

  1. I’ve also read that you just shouldn’t drink bottled water all because the bottles sit on supermarket shelves for months and chemicals from the plastic seep into the water very gradually. There’s also the fact that you’ve already paid for your tap water, which unlike bottled water, has to be treated for bacteria and other contaminates. Also, as quite a few people probably know by now, a lot of bottled water IS tap water, just repackaged!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s