BPA Exposure Can Harm Your Grandkids

By Edgy Truth

BPA, otherwise known as Bisphenol A and is found in a variety of plastics and canned foods, is now under deeper scrutiny after a study showed a potentially harmful link that could carry all the way down to a person’s grandchildren.

Scientists, using mice, exposed them to acceptable levels of BPA. The mice were pregnant. What happened next is the main issue: 3 generations of mice carried reduced fertility issues. The powerful link is groundbreaking and deeply unsettling in terms of what it could mean for people.

“Our study followed up on a previous study of ours that found that BPA can affect the development of the ovary and reduce fertility in the pups of pregnant mice exposed to the chemical,” University of Illinois comparative biosciences professor Jodi Flaws, who led the new analysis said to Medical XPress. “We found that exposing them to levels of BPA which are below what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says is a safe dose causes reproductive problems in these mice.”

This of course isn’t the first time we’ve heard how potentially bad BPA can be, in fact various FDA laws have been spawned preventing babies and toddlers from exposure. But such an indirect exposure and correlation is scary in the sense that it would be difficult to stop the effects from infecting a greater portion of society without completely getting rid of the chemical.

Another study on turtles showed similar results.

“Normally, the painted turtle’s sex is determined by the temperature of the environment during their development in the egg—cooler temperatures yield more male turtles, while warmer temperatures mean females are more likely to develop,” said Dawn Holliday, adjunct assistant professor of pathology and anatomical sciences in the MU School of Medicine and assistant professor of biology at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. “However, when turtle eggs are exposed to environmental estrogens, their sex is no longer determined by the temperature, but rather by the chemical to which they’re exposed.”

Photo: By Labelzine (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons