BPA is everywhere. A new study found the best way to avoid it: Stop buying or eating anything that isn’t homemade. It’s not very practical, but it does show how pervasive the chemicals are
BPA, as we have mentioned many times before, is a potentially toxic endocrine-disrupting chemical compound that’s virtually impossible to avoid in modern life. It’s found in soup can linings, plastic-packaged foods, medical devices, and dental sealants, among other places. Even if you vigilantly avoid all things plastic and canned, you’re not in the clear–BPA is also found in store receipts. And yet, there is at least one community of pregnant women that have shown significantly lower levels of BPA and phthalates (a toxic group of industrial chemicals used to make PVC) in their urine than those of other pregnant women in the U.S. Meet the Old Order Mennonites (OOM).
The OOM community, a Christian sect has been in the U.S. since the 1600s that actively avoids the materialistic lifestyle so many other people enjoy. They rely on local and homegrown food, and don’t employ technologies that they believe will harm their community. Is it any surprise, then, that they don’t have to deal with much of the toxicity that comes from our technologies and processed food?
Old time living had a life expectancy of 47 years in 1900. I wonder if OOM have sewers and treated water. Certainly BPA is preferable to the typhus pathogen that killed my uncle in his childhood.
I think OOM are allowed to take antibiotics, but typhus tended to become epidemic in crowded cities. But just moving off the grid’s no protection. I’ve spent most of June reacting to an airborne herbicide to which I happen to be “sensitive” (as is, strangely, every single human I know).
T’was a time long ago (1960′s) when you didn’t throw anything out unless it could be shown to do more harm than good.
The modern model (thank you, Rachael Carson) is to throw things out if there is even the slightest unfounded suspicion that it may do the smallest harm, regardless of how much good it does. This comes from a myopic focus on sensationalism by the media and the special interest groups for whom the media pimps.
Perhaps it is time we replaced environmental activism with good, old-fashioned conservationism.
Conservationism? I say drop the ism!