Baby Bottle Cautions

Are Chemicals Lurking in Your Baby's Bottle?

By Kelly Burgess

Melissa Katz-Moye of Portland, Ore., considers herself an "eco-minded mother." She sticks with organics and natural products and fibers in home furnishings, toys, food and clothing.

When her daughter, Noelani Rose, was born, she chose to breastfeed, and when she went back to work she made the commitment to express her milk and store it in plastic bottles in the freezer. Imagine her shock when a friend sent her a copy of a study done by Environment California showing that chemicals from those plastic bottles could be leaching into the stored breast milk.

Katz-Moye says she was concerned when she first got the report, but she also was worried about overreacting. Instead, she did some independent research. "I started reading about 'bad plastics' in other places and became convinced that I had to stop my baby from drinking out of plastic bottles," she says. "After speaking with my husband, who does not like plastics in general since so many of them end up in the ocean or in a landfill, we made the decision to purchase glass bottles."

This is not the first study to raise concerns about the purity of liquids stored in plastic bottles. Scientists and researchers made the first link when mice kept in plastic cages began to exhibit genetic abnormalities. Further studies on those mice found evidence of a chemical in their systems called bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to manufacture plastics. The BPA had evidently leached from the cages, as well as from the bottles with which the mice were watered. BPA is also widely used in toys, reusable drink bottles of various kinds, sippy cups, pacifiers, cans used for foods and thousands of other products.

What researchers at Environment California wanted to know was, specifically, if the BPA could be detected in formula stored in plastic baby bottles, and at what level exposure to BPA could cause genetic abnormalities. Since there are literally dozens of baby bottles on the market, they began their research by simply polling their members to ask what brands of bottles they used; they then tested the top five. All five were found to leach BPA. According to Dan Jacobson, legislative director of Environment California, one can infer from these findings that no plastic baby bottles containing BPA are safe, even though not all brands were tested.

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