An article about the study I posted about three days ago appeared on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today. Headline:  “Study links BPA in body to bottles.” The article was written by Beth Daley of the Boston Globe.

The study is the first to demonstrate that drinking from bottles containing BPA increases BPA levels in urine, said the researchers according to the article.

These bottles weren’t heated. If they were, the BPA levels in urine should be considerably higher, said researcher Karin B. Michels in the article.  She is particularly concerned about infants, who may be more susceptible to BPA’s possible endocrine disruption.   Meanwhile, a recent large human study linked BPA to increased risk of diabetes, liver toxicity, and heart disease, said the article.

The article gave some interesting details about how the study came to be.  Michels warned her students who carried water around in hard plastic bottles that the bottles contain BPA.  How much? asked the students. And the study was born.

A doctoral student, Jenny Carwile, organized the study, which enrolled 77 Harvard students.  They drank water from stainless steel bottles for a week to clear their systems, and then drank all cold beverages from a BPA-containing hard plastic bottle for a week. At the end of the week, urine BPA levels had shot up 70 percent.

Previous studies had demonstrated adverse health effects from BPA. But none had demonstrated whether polycarbonate bottles might be an important contributor to the amount of BPA in the body, said Carwile. Meanwhile, the FDA is saying that BPA in products is safe.  Because of this situation, states (Minnesota) and cities (Chicago) are starting to ban BPA in household products, said the article.

Rather than drink water from BPA-containing bottles, get yourself a home water filter and a stainless steel bottle to carry it in.