Plastic BPA drinking glasses for grown ups...

[MommyBird]

I forgot about these.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/80134821
We have had these for several months and they have been going through the dishwasher with no ill effect.
We use them in our pool house so they do not see super heavy use.
There is no safety info on the Ikea site.
They are very thin and light weight compared to the Target and William-Sanoma models we own. These are also the best value of all three.

I prefer clear drinking glasses and I avoid glass in the pool house and the trailer. These work great for me.
As I was born in 1960, I have been through my share of product scares. It is almost exciting to see what will be the next killer product fixation.

[MartianDestiny]

What exactly is wrong with caution, again?

Caution is fine, the hype is getting old. I'm tired of people literally yelling at me and insulting my intelligence because I refuse to throw away my perfectly good Nalgene bottles that are pre-"BPA free" era and I refuse to make it a personal major issue when shopping for things. I find it especially aggravating and intrusive since there is very little (if any) evidence that NORMAL USE will cause me any harm.

And for entertainment and illustrative purposes I submit the following:
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

[OakLeaf]

Erm, no one here yelled at you or insulted your intelligence. More than one poster insulted the OP's intelligence.

[channlluv]

If it concerns you, why not just use glass? ...I keep a ball jar of water in my car. No plastic taste, reusable, recyclable, the perfect material.

As a daughter of the South, I am truly disappointed in myself in that I did not think of this myself. Do you re-use a popped lid or do you use a fresh one?

And how easy to pop in a couple of tea bags and have sun tea waiting for you when you get off work. Brilliant.

Roxy

[bmccasland]

What no takers for *Free* Mardi Gras cups? They are breeding...


(which is due to the magical properties of Mardi Gras, nothing chemical what-so-ever)

[channlluv]

...while some of it gets flushed out, some of it ends up being deposited in adipocytes (fat cells). Most of the time, it's not a big problem. It becomes a problem when you start burning that fat.

Roxy, may I ask why the concern about nail polish?

Doggone it, the fat-burning is releasing toxins, too? Ai-yay-yay.

Regarding the nail polish, I attended a women's luncheon a couple or three years ago where the speaker had received a research grant from the organization and was there to speak about her study findings. She's the one who warned us off leaving plastic water bottles to get hot in cars, and off nail polish, because of the pthalates (I'm not sure I spelled that correctly) in the polish. Not that I've ever been a regular at the nail salon, but even the twice-a-year visit leaves me wondering about dangerous chemical exposure.

I did turn around and leave a salon back in August because when my daughter and I walked in, the chemicals in the air were so thick it burned our eyes. (From acrylics, I think.)

It's the cumulative exposure that has me worried.

My endocrinologist, after telling me I have a Vitamin D3 insufficiency (not quite as bad as a deficiency), even though I spend about five hours a week out in the afternoon sun with not a whole lot of clothing on, blamed the nationwide problem on the poor nutritional quality of our food. He said our food just isn't as nutritious as it used to be, and even though I eat a mostly organic diet now, it's a lifetime of not-as-smart food choices that have me in this predicament.

Roxy

[SadieKate]

And how easy to pop in a couple of tea bags and have sun tea waiting for you when you get off work. Brilliant.

Roxy

Well, at least your bacteria will be BPA-free.
http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/suntea.asp

[channlluv]

Oh geez, is nothing sacred anymore?

Oy.

:P

Roxy

[TsPoet]

TsPoet, I would like to know if the various studies were based on stored liquid or liquid that is just temporarily in the container. Obviously a gin & tonic taken out to the bocce ball court isn't going to sit in the glass for long. Similarly, wine doesn't last long in my high lead count crystal wine glasses, but we no longer use our crystal decanters.

The comment about BPA in canned food is significant. Sometimes the 5 second rule is valid.

Sorry, I've been at the annual Society of Toxicology meeting. I'm afraid the container-leaching details are beyond me. I have a colleague doing a study right now investigating the amount of BPA that can be measured in people's blood after consuming meals of food from containers with BPA (applesauce and spam are on the menu, as well as numerous other similar goods). If I remember, I'll post in about a year when he publishes his results.

[Cataboo]

Lol.

The other day I was in Costco and I saw two different sets of plastic glasses that were marked BPA free and I thought... oh, I should post about them in that TE thread and then I didn't, because this thread kept coming up with 2-3 pages of comments on it and I thought, surely someone has already told her that you can go to costco and get these sets of bpa free glasses for $10-20 or something.

But apparently I was completely off my mark! Now that I've read this thread.

As for plastics... I'm gonna spare telling everyone what my phd is in and the rest of that. I avoid them when convenient. I took a graduate level course in dna mutagenesis, blah blah blah from a really highly respected professor who told us all about how everything we were using was screamingly mutagenic. Including my shampoo and conditioner. I enjoy clean unknotted hair. That is all I have to say about that. Caffeine & alcohol are synergistically very mutagenic. I will still drink bailey's irish creme in my coffee occasionally - although I have a friend that does it every morning. Almost any plastic in monomeric form (when it breaks down) is mutagenic. Yes, most of these studies are done by either the Ames test or massive amounts being injected into rats and mice.

But you only have to look at studies of what they find in the breast milk of eskimos or the fat of polar bears and seals and whales to realize that all of these toxins accumulate in our bodies over time.

So - I haven't gotten rid of any of my plastic bottles, 'cause they're convenient. I do have a few new sigg bottles, but like I'm putting a metal bottle on a bike for a ride. And I use hydration bladders biking, kayaking and hiking. They might be bpa free, but I haven't really paid attention.

I do microwave & store food in glass containers and use those instead of plastic. I switched all my cookware to cast iron so as to not deal with the anti-stick stuff leaching.

It was somewhat funny, after new year's a friend & I drove down to Florida for a kayaking vacation and I had called her before hand and said... "You cannot bring glass containers of water when we're kayak camping. There's no room in the kayak. You will drink out of plastic... " Because anytime we go hiking or biking, she wants to bring along glass mason jars to hold her water. And I sorta do the.. right, if you want to carry those, go right ahead.

So I go to pick her up, and she loads 4 big apple juice glass jugs full of water into my car... And I do the... Erm... YOu realize there is water in florida... She says yep, but I have good water, they don't have good clean water like I do. I do the... "we are not putting big glass jars of water into the kayaks and going camping in the everglades with them... Big glass jars are not going to pack well in the kayak and it's going to imbalance them" And she says, right, this is just for when we're near the car.

So she did consent to drinking water out of plastic containers while kayak touring, but just seemed to try to minimize it as much as possible. She wouldn't eat any camp food I had brought that had B vitamins added to them or any high fructose corn syrup, so we ended up packing separate food bags for the trip. Apparently synthetic B vitamins are bad, so cliff bars can't be consumed. There were various other bad things that couldn't be consumed or pass her lips. It made things a bit complicated, and packing 2 separate sets of food takes up space and weight - which while not a huge big deal in a kayak it does add to the effort.

[Jlo]

That's why I prefer the drinking glasses, my health is good and will be for many years , the only problem they're expensive:http://www.twenga.com/dir-Housewares...inking-glasses , the world is unconscious, we need more glasses products but we created more and more cups and other plastic objects, the world is going down

[OakLeaf]

http://edrv.endojournals.org/content....full.pdf+html

Lay summary here.

Short version: "the dose makes the poison" doesn't mean that smaller concentrations are safer, when it comes to hormones and hormone disruption; the way the body handles hormones means that smaller amounts may actually be more dangerous.

Be safe, all.



(Also this from last year; granted the study was funded by an "alternative" plastics company, but that fact doesn't make me trust the products they tested any more, it just means I don't trust their product, either.)

[PamNY]

Tervis has a 16 oz. tumbler.

http://www.tervis.com/

[TsPoet]

So, I don't know if you can open it, but here is an article by our group... (someone suggested my comments were from a "business" point of view - um, I work for a Nat'l lab, so not really...)
http://apps.webofknowledge.com/Inbou...ode=FullRecord

And here are some somewhat scientific editorials on it...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbu...a-ignoring-it/

http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Q...henol-A-threat

and here's a load of BS about it - that is what people are choosing to believe - so read away and enjoy
http://grist.org/food/2011-09-26-did...e-bpa-is-safe/

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar...nd-bpa/245657/

[OakLeaf]

Scientific uncertainty is no excuse for failing to protect public health.

The title says it all.