Short Stuff: All about BPAs

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0:56Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. So this is Short Stuff about the beware of the BPAs.

1:07Josh Clark:That's right. We're talking about BPAs, specifically, well, BPA, which is, how do you pronounce that, Josh?

1:14Chuck Bryant:I'm going with bisphenol or bisphenol A.

1:18Josh Clark:Bisphenol A. There are other bisphenols, apparently, which I didn't know. And apparently, you know, none of these are good for you, even though the FDA is like, it's fine in the amounts that you're getting it.

1:30Chuck Bryant:Stop being so uptight, everybody. Yeah, they're used in all sorts of plastics, polycarbonate in particular, but that stuff shows up everywhere. It can be in the stuff that lines tin cans. It can be in your dental work. It can be in contact lens storage containers, baby bottles. It used to be. I don't think it is anymore. But it was everywhere. It's also now still today the greatest exposure that people get on average is from holding receipts, thermal paper receipts.

2:04Josh Clark:Oh, interesting.

2:05Chuck Bryant:Those are coated with BPA. So just be aware of that. I saw a study that said just holding one for 10 seconds exposes you to unsafe levels of BPA.

2:15Josh Clark:You know, many years ago when we lived in Los Angeles, and it's a joke Emily still laughs at to this day because it's just very me, very sardonically Chuck, was we left a blockbuster video and it was like print, print, print. And they did that thing where there was a ticker tape of like three feet of receipts, each connected by a little tiny piece of paper. And he handed them to me and I just went, thank you for the receipts. And Emily thought that was the funniest thing ever. And she still says it to this day.

2:46Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I can see being in the right place in the right frame of mind and just finding that awesome.

2:51Josh Clark:Yeah, like really stoned at Blockbuster?

2:55Chuck Bryant:Sure. Do you remember what you rented?

2:58Josh Clark:Oh, no, no, no. Who knows? But now that I don't feel so bad, now that I know that those things are loaded with BPAs, I don't want those in my pocket.

3:06Chuck Bryant:No, you don't. And the reason why we're even like talking about BPA is all thanks to a geneticist named Dr. Patricia Hunt, who was studying the ovaries of mice back in the late 90s, 1998. That was her jam. She was not looking for BPA. She was not studying BPA at all. But BPA came and found her, essentially.

3:29Josh Clark:Yeah, she saw these chromosomal errors start popping up. They went from 2 % to 40 % in these mice that she was studying in the control group. And, you know, there was miscarriage. There were birth defects in these little baby mice. It's all very sad. And she ran some more tests, and she was like, you know what? All of these cages and water bottles that these mice are drinking out of have BPA in them. And I think that's where it's coming from. So she swapped that stuff out with non-BPA stuff. Everything returned to normal. and she was like, I think I found something really bad here, everybody.

4:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, she did. She also really started to examine what BPA did. Disrupted fetal development, the eggs of the fetus that had its development disrupted, that fetus's eventual babies, those were also disrupted as well. So yeah, she was like, I think something is really bad here. And what she turned up is that BPA acts as an endocrine disruptor, meaning it mimics a hormone in our body which does all sorts of stuff because our hormones are very very well precisely timed and you go over here and do this you go over here and do that and if something shows up on mass and is like we're gonna do all of this at once there's all sorts of catastrophic things that can happen to the human body yeah for sure and in this case in the case

4:52Josh Clark:of bpa what it really does is affect estrogen and estrogen has a huge effect on a lot of stuff i I think it can affect the behavior of more than 200 genes. And almost every organ and tissue in the body can be affected by estrogen. So this was a big deal. At the time, there were a lot of initial reactions of like, you know, we're not sure how bad this stuff is for you. We're not going to do anything right now. Like the evidence is like not really conclusive because we're not mice. And so we're not necessarily going to experience the same health effects. And again, these limits are like the amount that we're getting shouldn't harm like, you know, children and adults.

5:37Chuck Bryant:Right. That was wrong, it turns out, that the limits that we were being exposed to were considered very harmful now. But something weird, just a little thing to kind of put aside, it actually turns out that low doses of BPA have worse effects than larger doses of BPA.

5:56Josh Clark:Yeah, that's weird.

5:57Chuck Bryant:I didn't see anywhere that that was explained, so I came up with my own explanation. It's Three Stooges Syndrome, which is how, remember, Mr. Burns had every disease, but none of them were affecting him because they were all trying to get through the same door at once. I think that's what happens. When you have a bunch of BPA, they all get stuck trying to get through the same door at the same time, and it doesn't affect you like a little bit does, which can make it right through the door.

6:22Josh Clark:All right, Dr. Clark, we're going to take a break and ponder that, and we'll be right back with more on BPAs.

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8:04Josh Clark:I gotta say, I'm very impressed.

8:06Chuck Bryant:Thank you, but I feel like I should say I am not a doctor, and you really shouldn't listen to me with any medical stuff whatsoever.

8:12Josh Clark:But I called you a doctor.

8:14Chuck Bryant:Oh, well, then I'm a doctor. All right.

8:17Josh Clark:So in the United States, the FDA is in charge of regulating the BPA use. And in 2010, they did a four-year review of BPA studies, which resulted in 2014, basically saying, you know what? We're upholding our previous no-observe adverse effects label. As long as you don't get more than five milligrams of body weight per kilogram of body weight per day, you'll be fine.

8:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I think that that is a level that most people are never exposed to, right?

8:52Josh Clark:Well, that's what they say. I mean, we should talk about some of the things, though. I know you mentioned a few things, but let me see here. type 2 diabetes, potentially in adults, insulin resistance in children and adults, polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity and hypertension in children and adults.

9:10Chuck Bryant:Yeah, a lot of terrible stuff. And again, this is not to mention like the preterm births, developmental abnormalities, like all sorts of different stuff that has to do with reproduction, breast cancer, tumors, like all of these things. Like it used to be like, like you said, we're not mice and, you know, that whole settled science BS that like the merchants of doubt used to put out like just shamelessly. Like if you look at meta-analyses of studies about BPA and its effect on the human body, like you said, that's what comes up. It's obviously you can never prove anything like without a shadow of a doubt.

9:49Chuck Bryant:That's just how science works. But it's essentially to the point where you, the individual person, can feel pretty good about not wanting BPA anywhere near you.

9:58Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Europe, of course, is leading the way in front of us. In April, just a few years ago in 2023, their FDA, which is the European Food Safety Authority, said, all right, we've seen the research. And I think they lowered their safe level a lot, I think to 0.2, what is that, 0.2 nanograms, which is two billionths of a gram or 0.2 billionths of a gram per day for like, you know, a human body. So that's way lower than ours is.

10:34Chuck Bryant:Well, yeah, and it's even lower than what their previous one was. Their previous one was still way lower than ours. So ours was five milligrams per kilogram. I think it's the same still. Their old one was four micrograms per kilogram of body weight. So now it's their new revised safe level is 20 ,000 times lower than their own previous safe level. 10 billion trillion-ish times lower than our safe level in the United States. And when the European Food Safety Authority basically decided this, there were all sorts of like, you know, is this true? Is this right? You know, and of course, industry was pushing back on it.

11:20Chuck Bryant:The only paper I found that was critical of it, an academic journal paper that was critical of their methods of data collection, I was like, funded this. It was funded by the American Chemistry Council. So it seems pretty like the EFSA has, over the years or since April 2023, continued to issue defenses of its decision and not like, we decided, so shut up. They're like, we decided and here's why. We decided, here's all the data we did this on. So it seems pretty legitimate that they're like, this is way worse than we have been taking it. And especially in the United States. Yeah.

12:04Josh Clark:Well, if you go to the FDA website today, what's the date? April 30th, 2026. It says FDA's current perspective based on its most recent safety assessment is that BPA is safe at the current levels occurring in foods. Based on FDA's ongoing safety review of scientific evidence, the available information continues to support the safety of BPA for the currently approved uses in food containers and packaging. but if you don't buy that and I don't I don't think Dr. Josh does you need to look for a label that says BPA free that will indicate that the plastic does not have

12:42Josh Clark:bisphenol is that what you said?

12:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah, you did it.