If you're a new mother who first heats your baby's plastic bottles in the microwave or hot water, and then cleans them in the dishwasher, you might be horrified to know that you could be feeding your precious little one a dose of carcinogens with every swallow.
Millions of plastic baby bottles, and other everyday plastic products, contain a substance called Bisphenol A, or BPA. Studies have linked prenatal exposure to BPA to a variety of disorders, including behavioral difficulties and early puberty in children, and estrogen imbalances, enlarged prostrates, and lowered sperm counts in adults. It's also been connected to prostate cancer and breast cancer, and may interfere with fetal brain development.
BPA from plastic bottles in known to leach into the liquids they contain, and heating them before feeding your baby, or washing them in hot water afterwards only destabilizes the plastics so they leach more. You, of course, wouldn't think of asking your baby to drink cold breast milk or formula, or want to use a dirty bottle. And you certainly wouldn't want to expose a baby you're carrying to BPA before he or she is born. But what can you do to avoid it completely?
Thanks to the growing concern about BPA's negative health effects, many plastics manufacturers makers have now begun producing BPA-free bottles and cookware. BPA is used in polycarbonate plastic, and is always identifiable by the little triangle with a "7" on the bottom of the container. Today, most plastics used to store food and drinks are made of either polyprolene, identifiable by a triangle containing a "5," or polyethylene, assigned triangles "1," "2," and "4." Both are BPA-free, and even better, are not known to leach the substances they do contain.
So why not spare your baby the risks associated with BPA by doing an online search for BPA-free bottles? They are now readily available from a number of online vendors, and are competitively priced!
