Bisphenol A is a chemical that solves a product design problem: if added in minute quantities to polyvinyl chloride, it creates a virtually shatterproof plastic that is dirt cheap compared to glass and other plastics. For parents, that means inexpensive baby bottles that are less likely to shatter and put parents and babies at risk. Most parents assume that if something is for sale, it must be safe, otherwise the government wouldn’t let it into stores. Right?
Unfortunately, that’s not true of bisphenol A. It is not alone, of course, but that’s another story. For many years a significant body of science has indicated that bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor. In particular, it disrupts many of the developmental processes that babies need to go through in order to become healthy children, healthy teenagers, and healthy adults.
Last month, manufacturers of baby bottles promised to stop using bisphenol A in their products. They were not responding to alerts from their scientific staff but to pending legislation in several states and a long campaign by parents and environmental organizations. This high-minded act under duress leaves untouched the wide variety of other products that take advantage of the magic worked by bisphenol A on polyvinyl chloride as well as the use of bisphenol A in other applications such as polycarbonate water jugs and composite fillings for teeth.
It’s certainly unfortunate that such a useful chemical turned out to be a bad apple. Who knew?
Rachel’s Democracy and Health News recently published an answer. The answer is this. “Agents foreign to the reactions constituting life will be toxic to life.”
In other words, we should automatically assume that any chemical that is not already a part of our body’s biochemical waltz should be considered a toxin until proven otherwise. And to show that proof, candidate chemicals need to be tested at minute concentrations with the assumption that the dose-response curve is U-shaped—that is, the greatest risk is at high and low doses instead of the currently assumed linear dose-response realtionship, where toxicity is proportional to the dose. For example, bisphenol A is toxic at a concentration of one part per quadrillion—that’s a one followed by 15 zeros or one part per one thousand million million.
The reason has to do with the basic chemistry of life.
Our cells perform hundreds of thousands of reactions each second. The reactions need to be coordinated. For that purpose, many of these reactions consist of signals between different parts of a cell, between cells, and between the cells of different tissues and organs. It is a highly complex system that has evolved over billions of years and so is also quite resilient. However, the important biochemical feature of the signaling reactions is that they of necessity must take place at very low doses.
It is like having several thousand people on a ship with everybody talking specific things that have to be done to keep the ship afloat. Each person needs to talk only as loud as it takes to be heard by the person with whom they’re in conversation. If someone raises their voice, others will too, and soon everybody’s shouting, communication falls apart, and the ship sinks.
In biochemistry, this low dose conversation within and among cells is called signal transduction, science that has really only developed in the last decade or so. What our understanding of signal transduction clearly shows is that xenochemicals, chemicals foreign to life, are potent at the low doses at which cells converse. It’s as though someone came onto the ship and started talking in the middle of other peoples’ conversations.
That in itself does not necessarily mean bad news. After all, we have an entire industry of pharmaceuticals that consists of introducing xenochemicals into the conversation of cells and look what marvelous things they do? OK. Although that comment is deserved, it is not to the point because pharmaceuticals are not administered in signal transduction low doses. However, their presence in our water supplies is in signal transduction doses. But I digress.
For xenochemicals like bisphenol A at signal transduction low doses it is bad news. A systematic search of independent research (that is, research that was not paid for by industry) on the biological effects of xenochemicals in low doses found that 99% of those chemicals show risks of toxicity.
How could this be? Because, as with bisphenol A, those xenochemicals solve problems that arise in product and production process design. Why don’t manufacturers find non-toxic alternatives? Because they don’t have to. All they have to do is make money, design a product that they can sell, and stay in business. None of these have anything to do with producing products that meet human needs, including the need not to be poisoned.
If you’re mesmerized by the magic of the free market, you might think that the discipline of designing products that sell would force manufacturers to produce useful and non-toxic products. Not true. Consumer sovereignty is another fantasy that emanates from the idea that the magic of the market provides for all needs: vote with your dollars and manufacturers will follow. Also not true. Bisphenol A is coming out of baby bottles not because manufacturers see a market opportunity but because parents and environmentalists as citizens not as consumers got up the face of manufacturers and legislators.
There are two lessons here. First, avoid products that contain xenochemicals like the plague—which they are. It’s good for you, your children, and their children to the seventh generation. Which products are those? Any products you’re not confident are safe. Second, there’s a collective solution: create an economy in which the purpose of production is not to make money, sell products, and stay in business, but to meet actual human needs, including the need to not be poisoned.
