Let’s see if we can wrap our minds around this scenario! It turns out that scientific studies have now proven exposure to BPA, bisphenol A, creates all kinds of reporductive ‘confussion’.
BPA is, but one more toxic chemical that has been absorbed into the envirnment and into humans…for generations. BPA is the substance used to create the slightly stiffer plastic items we use daily to take in much of our food and drink.
First let’s address only a few ways this toxin gets inside of us.
Many of the foods we eat come from cans that are coated on the inside with BPA to prevent the leaching of metal into the foods. We’re jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Speaking of heat, studies show that heating items that are made with BPA increases its ‘leaching’ or contamination with the BPA molecules. Millions of baby bottles are made with plastic containing BPA. As any parent knows baby bottles are continually exposed to heat. Many of todays water bottles are also manufactured using BPA. Beer and wine fermentation vats and even sealants used to protect children from cavities. The exposure to BPA is ubiquitous. There is no possilbe way for me to list all the ways this toxin is absorbed by humans.
To put the use of BPA into some perspective, more than 6 billion, that’s billion with a b, are produced yearly. The wide use of this chemical started in the 1950. Simply put, for more than a half century we have been slowly changeing the face of our own genitic make up, now reaching critical mass.
Now let’s look at just one ramification of BPA, which is quite simply amazing. Females reproductive eggs are established, formed and grown while still in the womb. When a woman has been exposed as we all have since the 1950’s to BPA, not only were our grandmothers eggs, ie, our parents who started growing their reproductive systems in utero and then in turn our own, but our children are now representing the 4th generation of BPA ’scrambled eggs’.
To understand this completely I’ve drawn a comparison from BPA in human ‘eggs’ to pearls. As a small particle of sand is at the core of a pearl, these BPA molecules are at the very beginning of the formation of our eggs and sperm. What BPA was absorbed by our grandmothers, was passed then in utero to our parents, this before they were ever exposed to any outside products containting BPA. You can see how the passing on, and the continuous exposoure of this chemical is having a cumulitive effect on all of us.
More than 700 published studies have been decrying the use of BPA. These studies have been summarily dismissed over the years by ‘experts’ in the field of plastics.
Studies have shown in lab rats that low doses of BPA have caused gender confussion. The feminazation of males, and the defeminazation of females, are giving the scientific community great cause for concern. Females when exposed to far lower doses of BPA than the equivilant ‘recomended safe’ exposure to humans caused them to take on masquline traits such as agression, sexual prowess and a lack of maternal nurturing towards their offspring. The females spent far less time in the nest, and took on male traits.
Bisphenol A is only one of far too many toxins we are exposing ourselves and future generations to that are used by us daily. It’s time for us to start turning the tide back to clean wholesome glass containers for our food and drink.
It would be easier to list product that don’t contain any type of phthalates. This Class of toxic chemical is being found in nearly everything that is tested for its presence.
In our environment everything from literally, from below the ground to the air we breathe, up to the clouds held in that air, contain some amount of phthalates.
Building materials, all types of flooring PVC pipes and even household dust contains phthalates. Kitchen utensils and packaging of all types of products that contact both you and your food are found in our environment.
In hospitals, besides the building materials and plastic pipes phthalates are found in blood-bags, medical tubing ans all sorts of medical equipment. This is especially disturbing when considering people in hospitals generally have compromised health situations thereby perhaps making them more susceptible to the dangers of this class of chemical.
Cosmetic products are replete with phthalates. Products such as perfumes, hair spray and nail polish. Women between the ages of 20-40 years were found to have the highest levels of phthalates of any group tested. This is especially disturbing when considering woman in that age group in the main child bearing years. Given the fact that phthalates are endocrine disruptor and estrogen stimulators; no wonder birth defects of males reproductive systems are on the rise.
Also commonly found in foods, phthalates are easily absorbed by fatty foods such as cheese and meat. Restrictions placed on plastics contain phthalates coming in contact with food were meant to reduce the exposure and absorption of these chemicals. But, these chemicals are entering food from a variety of ways, not just from being wrapped in plastics.
Phthalates are being found in food before processing, suggesting they are so prevalent in our environment there may be no way to escape them.
Vast amounts of products containing phthalates plastics such as PVC, toiletries and cosmetics are being literally washed down the drain into sewage and wastewater systems. From wastewater it then goes on to rivers, estuaries and the sea. Ocean habitat, marine mammals and everything in the middle are being affected and poisoned by runoff tainted with these chemicals.
Plastics being incinerated are distributed into the atmosphere where they are then rained down upon the oceans and land. Crops are being irrigated with water that contains phthalates and then is run through pipes that contain them. Crops are then harvested and fed to animals that we then eat that are processed in plants that use equipment that cnatinas phthalates…We are getting the picture!
There isn’t any way for me to put into words the totality of this situation, other than saying “it’s even in our urine”.
How can we protect ourselves from the ubiquitous phthalate? One government website suggests we vacuume regularly. How ridiculous!
The old joke ‘if you want to feel like a real woman, then wash this shirt and get me a beer’ may actually have more truth to it than we previously thought.
I don’t mean to imply men don’t do laundry. But, the constant contact with household cleaners usually does fall upon the human female. So it’s remarkable to find a connection between a class of toxic chemicals widely used in household detergents and the feminization of male fish.
This development has been studied for about the last 10 years. Nonylphenol ethoxylates, (NPE) known as estrogenic, means contact with this chemical will actually stimulate the production of estrogen.
There’s some irony! Maybe washing shirts really does make me feel more like a woman.
I don’t know if the mature male fish that carry eggs in their testes exhibit female behavior, but eggs in the reproductive system is definitely a female trait.
Canada and Europe have tighter restrictions imposed on the use of NPEs than the US.
In the US the answer to the use of these toxic class chemicals appears to be awarding certificates, maybe bronze plaques to companies that voluntarily commit to the use of safer substitutes for NPEs. How’s that for feminization? Why not a nice scrapbook page for their memory book too?
Voluntarily reducing the use of toxic chemicals is a ‘good thing’ as Martha Stewart would say. Procter & Gamble and Unilever have voluntarily substituted NPE’s with other chemicals in their products. Wal-Mart is still trying to hop on the green-train by rewarding companies it does business with that find alternatives to NPEs.
The Sierra Club thinks it’s time the EPA takes action to restrict or ban the use of this class of chemical.
Feminized or intersex fish have been found nearly everywhere. This leads me to agree with the idea that more than on estrogen stimulating, endocrine blocking chemical is being introduced into the environment and in more than one way.
Meanwhile, male salmon are loosing their urge to swim up stream, and becoming more amiable to staying home with the kids and keeping house.
More tomorrow on Phthalates, Nonylphenol ethoxylates, the Feminization of Marine life and the Human Male.
China has one million food-processing plants give or take a few thousand; whose counting anyway?
Apparently China is counting. The ‘State Administration for Industry and Commerce’, a Chinese regulatory agency said 152,000, yes that’s one hundred fifty-two thousand, food plants and retailers were shut down last year due to unsanitary and substandard food being sold.
Now 180 more factories have been closed. They haven’t been closed due to employees failing to wash up after lavatory visits, they haven’t been closed because hairs were falling out of the nets into the potato salad. No, nothing that benign; Nothing that innocent.
These factories were purposfully, with forethought, contaminating their foods and products. Toss in some malice sprinkled with forethought and we, in the west, call that a felony. Using things like formaldehyde to heft up a product, keep it from spoiling, or any other reason seems far from a malice free act. Even an illiterate should be able to reason things like anti-freeze, formaldehyde are poisons. Most people never want to come in contact with formaldehyde until they’re dead and many don’t want to even then.
Sadly formaldehyde and anti-freeze are on the short list of poisons being pumped into a long list of Chinese products. Paraffin and industiral oil perhaps? How about mixing in a little ‘already used’ food. I’m unable to determine in which food group ‘recycled food, expired, or already used’ may fall.
So, 23,000 contaminated food products were seized by Chinese inpsectors and they aren’t finished yet. And, less than 1 percent of regulated imports from China were even inspected by the US FDA.
So what is our tally now? 152,180 Chinese factories closed since December. China says, most of these factories were small, having fewer than 10 employees, and they were ‘unlicensed’. If China is trying the quell the trepidation with which the west is eye-balling their products, calling a business with fewer than 10 employess a factory isn’t a step in the right direction. Around here that’s a ‘mom and pop’ business. That’s Mom, Pop their three kids and their spouses. Oh, and one cousin. See how that makes 9 employees? That’s fewer than 10 employees which in China constitutes a ‘factory’.
But, now comes the fun part of this equation; these small ‘factories’ make up 75% of China’s one million food-processing plants. Excuse me? Now here’s the real question. At some point did China lay down the figure of 1 million food-processing plants in order to impress the west or maybe intimidate? Were I wanting to become a player on the ‘world market’ it could be advantageous to inflate my presense, like a puffer fish, in order to appear a little larger to preditors. On the other hand, when the products I’m exporting start turning up with poison in them, it would behoove me to say that a group of tiny, unregulated, unlicensed ‘vendors’ is what ‘did-me-in’. Understandably and entirely not my fault.
China wanted to look like a formidable player on the world market. It looks as though the way to do that was for the government to spread it’s arms open wide and sweep in every available resourse, including the ‘mom and pop’ operations.
Maybe the ’sleeping giant’ really has been asleep. Maybe the giant part is the consumer. Maybe we underestimated China’s consumer goods manufacturing prowess. Maybe we saw millions of tanks, and hundreds of millions of woven Chinese Finger Traps and mistook that for commercial expertise.
If Friday’s news about factory closures’ was meant to quell the rising fears concerning Chinese Imports…it didn’t work on me.
China, China, China. What will we do with Chinese imports?
After thousands of pets in North America became ill or died, from the use of tainted Chinese wheat gluten why would China not be more careful about the quality of their exports?
One could get the idea the China may not care how many people become sick or die from poisons contained in their products. Can this actually be the case? Why then are they sending Scallops and Sardines coated with putrefying bacteria to America?
Why are they shipping toxic cosmetics, tainted dietary supplements or dried apples preserved with cancer-causing chemicals to the rest of the world?
I get the message the Chinese are sending.
US inspection records show that China has been flooding the US with foods unfit for human consumption for years. The crime is that these products where simply sent back to China where they were, shipped right back to the US once, twice or three more times in an attempt to send the same poisoned products to American consumers.
Have we become so dependent upon cheap Chinese goods that we cannot live without them? It looks to me like many of us will stop living if we keep using them.
Canada exports $10 billion in FDA-regulated food and agricultural products to the US each year, of which, 56 shipments were rejected. By comparison 298 shipments from China’s $2 billion imports were rejected. Horror of horrors, only less than 1 percent of regulated imports from China were even inspected by the FDA.
In the past year the USDA has seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of Chinese meat being smuggled into the US. No meat from China is approved for import into the US. Apparently ‘dried lily flowers and prune slices’ are allowed, because that is what Chinese exporters have labeled their pirate shipments of meat.
China is aiming for certification so that they can legally ship poultry into the US. I don’t want a Chinese chicken legal, or otherwise, on the entire continent. I will never believe what they send will be safe. I think the US can grow more than enough chicken to meet American demand.
I think we have enough problems here already without importing new ones.
There is a story about a scorpion walking along the bank of a river, wondering how he would get to the other side. He saw a fox preparing to swim cross the river and he asked the fox to give him a ride.
The fox said, “no, if I do that you will sting me and I will drown.” But, the scorpion sold the fox on the idea by saying, “If I did that we would both drown.”
That logic made sense to the fox and he agreed. Half way across the river, the scorpion stung the fox. As the fox began to die he asked the scorpion, “Why did you do that? Now you’ll die too.”
“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”
What is the ‘nature’ of the relationship China wishes to have with the US? I won’t apologize for asking.
