Let's see if BPA really makes girls more aggressive

Venus flytrap. Photo: Robin Gallagher

Sandy Sand has a (tongue-in-cheek) suggestion for determining if BPA is indeed detrimental to our health.

Not to be too cynical, but should any of us be drinking or eating from plastic containers that contain BPA?

Whether they be rumor or factual, for years there have been claims that BPA (bisphenyl A) is leeched out from plastics and are of special concern to mothers who are bottle feeding their babies. So far, Connecticut and Minnesota, the city of Chicago and a county in New York have banned the sale of baby bottles, baby food containers and sippy cups containing BPA.

Of course, the plastic bottle and container industry is saying “pish-tosh” to the entire matter. What the hell do they care; they just want to sell merchandise in the cheapest, most convenient containers they can.

The consumer, too, wants the most convenient containers. If they didn't, billions of water bottles wouldn't be sold worldwide each year. One would also think that they'd want safe water bottles. Maybe they don't really care, or perhaps they aren't aware of the possible dangers from BPAs, or convenience simply outweighs safety.

I should state now that I don't know, and while I'm suspicious of the plastic bottles I continue to buy them because it's so convenient to throw a capped water bottle in my purse or keep one on my desk where there's less danger of it falling over and ruining my computer keyboard. In my defense -- if you can call it that, most of the water I drink comes from the tap, and that, too, has its "yuk" factor.

Skeptics such as me don’t believe anything manufacturers say about their products where health or product safety is concerned; that goes for the FDA, too. Both have been caught too many times in bald-faced lies.

That brings me to the recent study published in Environmental Health Perspectives which found that BPA may be making little girls more aggressive. The preliminary results of the 10-year study suggest that women who have high concentrations of BPA half-way through their pregnancy are more likely to have aggressive and hyperactive 2-year-old daughters.

The nipples used on bottles and pacifiers aren’t the focus of the study, but I have to wonder about them, too. They’re made from plastic and make the most immediate and continual contact with babies’ mouths, and whatever is sucked off of them has a direct route into the tots’ bloodstreams.

Perhaps a far-out experiment is in order.

Let’s take a bunch of those supposed felonious suspects -- the BPAs -- and feed them to Venus flytraps, insectivorous plants that voraciously gobble up their prey when they come too close.

With the name “Venus,” they must all be females, so let’s give the young plants an ample dose of BPA and see if they become even more aggressive in their insect eating by reaching out and attacking anything that comes flying or crawling near them.

Since plants mature far faster than humans, the Venus flytrap seems a likely subject for such an experiment (lending a very catchy name for the study), and maybe we can find out quickly -- and once and for all -- just how harmful BPA really is.