A few weeks ago I was watching Martha Stewart and was shocked to find out that I have been poisoning myself and my children for years now. Of course I was doing so out of ignorance. I guess that hoped that someone would be looking out for me and not allow such a thing to occur.
How have I been poisoning myself and my children? Water bottles/baby bottles. According to the guest on Martha's show, who was an environmental activist, bottles with the #7 recycle designation can leach endocrine altering chemicals into your water. It was so bad that she said Canada has declared the bottles dangerous and is taking steps to ban the #7 bottles altogether. So I rushed to my cabinet to find in horror that I had several #7 type bottles and that some of these were my absolute favorite. They were the Nalgene type bottles that I have had for years. And though I can't check because I threw away the baby bottles when my youngest grew out of the bottle stage, I am pretty sure that the baby bottles we used for both girls were the same plastic. I was concerned that maybe the information I had was not completely unbiased. So I did a little research on the internet and though I did find a lot of potentially biased environmentally concerned sites, I did find a medical site that convinced me that this is a pretty serious situation. The bottles are leaching BPA which can mimic estrogen and cause problems for men and early puberty for young girls, among other things. For the article click on the link below this entry.
Now the problem I have is that I want to get water bottles for our up-coming vacation and I cannot seem to find non-#7 bottles. The #7's are everywhere. I even accidentally bought a couple of bottles at Target that I thought were #1 but when I got home I realized they were #7s and so I promptly returned them. Again I turned to the internet and found that camelback has a new BPA free bottle (though I have looked at the bottom of many camelbacks in the last few weeks that have #7 on the bottom). Not sure If I will be able to find it in the stores or if I will have to buy it on the internet. At any rate, I hope that soon companies will do the responsible thing and stop selling the poison bottles.
Click Here for the Medical Article
Click Here for the Camelback website
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