Posted on 01/20/2008 9:13:33 PM PST by neverdem
In the 1967 film classic The Graduate, a businessman corners Benjamin Braddock at a cocktail party and gives him a bit of career advice. "Just one word plastics."
Although Benjamin didn't heed that recommendation, plenty of other young graduates did. Today, the planet is awash in products spawned by the plastics industry. Residues of plastics have become ubiquitous in the environmentand in our bodies.
A federal government study now reports that bisphenol A (BPA)the building block of one of the most widely used plasticslaces the bodies of the vast majority of U.S. residents young and old.
Manufacturers link BPA molecules into long chains, called polymers, to make polycarbonate plastics. All of those clear, brittle plastics used in baby bottles, food ware, and small kitchen appliances (like food-processor bowls) are made from polycarbonates. BPA-based resins also line the interiors of most food, beer, and soft-drink cans. With use and heating, polycarbonates can break down, leaching BPA into the materials they contact. Such as foods.
And that could be bad if what happens in laboratory animals also happens in people, because studies in rodents show that BPA can trigger a host of harmful changes, from reproductive havoc to impaired blood-sugar control and obesity (SN: 9/29/07, p. 202).
For the new study, scientists analyzed urine from some 2,500 people who had been recruited between 2003 and 2004 for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Roughly 92 percent of the individuals hosted measurable amounts of BPA, according to a report in the January Environmental Health Perspectives. It's the first study to measure the pollutant in a representative cross-section of the U.S. population.
Typically, only small traces of BPA turned up, concentrations of a few parts per billion in urine, note chemist Antonia M. Calafat and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Scary!
Yay! I’m not fat because I’m lazy! I’m fat because my eating bowl made me so!
But, seriously. There was a program on Discovery years ago called Assault on the Male. It was about a substance used in plastics that acted like estrogen in the human body.
So, there it is again. It’s not my fault I whine like a baby. It’s the plastics!
Ohh... that’s a pretty fabric. I bet it’d make a nifty dress.
But you are right. Scary if true.
This explains a lot. On the bad days, I’m pretty sure that those plastics are all that are holding me together. LOL
bump
Now I can really tell my wife that my sh#t doesn’t stink because it’s encased in plastic.
OMIGOD! The world is going to end (again).
Actually, I believe Sam Wainwright tells George Baily in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) to invest in plastics. What's this 1967 stuff?
If you go to the source, you can link the original article.
Being curious, and seeing enough stories about male bass with ovaries, precocious puberty, childhood obesity and maturity onset diabetes of the young, I decided that endocrinedisruptors and bisphenola would be good as keywords to find some earlier threads.
Headaches Linked To Mobile Phones
After Linking New Strain of Staph to Gay Men, University Scrambles to Clarify
Pregnancy Problems Tied to Caffeine
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
IF that is true you better avoid margarine. It’s basically a couple molecule switchs from plastic.
The Sciencians better knock it off. I’m running out of issues that need a blame surrogate.
What will I do if I run out of “not my faults” and they’re still making stuff useful for excuses?
I’ll need to invent issues! Oh, no. I’m going to need to add another therapist. I still have Weds open.
Well, there goes my “process” day. Thanks a lot Sciencians.
I think if this was a SERIOUS problem, our life expectancy wouldn’t have kept going up over the past 50 years.
Oh, the inanity!
If that were true, there'd be Gay-Pride Parades and stuff.
I had a chemistry professor in college that insisted "Baco's " bacon bit substitute was chemically one step away from motor oil.....
Living in a plastic land...
Somebody give me a hand...
Music to read this thread by...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmBDIj2fbB8&feature=related
Thanks for the ping, neverdem
somebody give me a cheeseburger (actually I think I’ll grab another cup of coffee)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.