Plastic Make Us Fat

Animal studies in recent years raise the possibility that prenatal exposure to minuscule amounts of common chemicals — found in everything from baby bottles to toys — could predispose a body to a life of weight gain. The chemicals, known as endocrine disrupters, mimic natural hormones that help regulate, for example, how many fat cells a body makes and how much fat to store in them.

Thousands of chemicals have come on the market in the past 30 years, and some of them are showing up in people's bodies in low levels. Scientists studying obesity are focusing on endocrine disrupters — which have already been linked to reproductive problems in animals and humans — because they have become so common in the environment and are known to affect fat cells.

One key researcher in the field, Bruce Blumberg of the University of California, Irvine, has even coined a new word for chemicals that can make you fat: Obesogens.

A recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 93 percent of the US population had bisphenol A, a chemical that can be found in canned goods and in hard, clear plastic items such as baby bottles and hiking containers, in their body. A study at the University of Missouri-Columbia showed that mice fed bisphenol A during early development — at lower amounts than what would have resulted in the levels found in most people in the CDC study — become markedly more obese as adults than those that weren't fed the chemical. Tufts University scientists observed similar phenomenon in rats.

For those who don't want to wait until all the evidence is in, there is another question: How to avoid these chemicals now?

"It can be difficult," said Felix Grun, assistant researcher in the department of developmental and cell biology at the University of California who works with Blumberg. To minimize exposure to bisphenol A, Grun said people can avoid buying plastics with the recycling number 7 marked on the bottom, but similar types of chemicals abound in other products, too. "These compounds are everywhere, the carpet fibers, the PVC piping, etc," he said.

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Why Should You Use Stainless Steel Water Bottles?

Here are some quick facts taken from the MSLK Watershed exhibit about the plastic the water bottle epidemic plaguing our planet:

• 80% of the the 50 billion bottles the US consumes each year, end up in a landfill - that's 40 billion unrecycled water bottles, wonder how many end up in our oceans?

• It takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce these plastic bottles each year.

• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (the size of Texas) is a circulating pile of plastic that has not biodegraded. The stuff that does biodegrade only results in smaller pieces that are harder to clean up.

• If you drink 2 Liters of tap water a day, it only costs you 50 cents per year to drink. Drinking the same amount, but bottled will cost you nearly 1000 times more.

• Plastic is known to leach toxins into our food and water, which have been linked to health issues such as reproductive problems and cancer.

• New York City tap water surpasses all federal and state health standards.

• Given the current environmental and economic situations at hand, it is important now more than ever to not waste money on such a harmful product, the consumption of which has become a worldwide epidemic.

For the reasons above, it's highly suggestible that we should be using some sort of non disposable containers for our drinking water. Stainless steel water bottles give us an excellent solution to the non-sustainable habit we have created during recent years.

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Arsenic poison In Chicken Feed Pose Health Risks To Humans

Nugget : An arsenic in chicken feed may pose health risks to humans who eat meat from chickens that are raised on the feed, according to an article in the April 9 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.

SALISBURY -- Since the 1970s, the poultry industry has used certain arsenic-based ingredients as chicken feed additives, but some researchers have started to scrutinize the long-standing practice because of possible health and environmental risks.

A common arsenic used by chicken companies is roxarsone, the most common arsenic-based additive used in chicken feed, is used to promote growth, kill parasites and improve pigmentation of chicken meat. In its original form, roxarsone is relatively benign. But under certain anaerobic conditions, within live chickens and on farm land, the compound is converted into more toxic forms of inorganic arsenic. Arsenic has been linked to bladder, lung, skin, kidney and colon cancer, while low-level exposures can lead to partial paralysis and diabetes, the article notes.

After consuming roxarsone, the arsenic additive approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration, chickens then excrete the compound in a chemical form that is virtually unchanged.

For years, medical experts have warned that chronic human exposure to arsenic could lead to certain forms of cancer.

The National Academies, which advises the federal government on a range of health and science issues, reported to Congress in 2001 "that the data indicate arsenic causes cancer in humans at doses that are close to the drinking water concentrations that occur in the United States."

According to the researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey, one chicken excretes about 150 milligrams of roxarsone in a 42-day growth period. Litter collected during that period contains between 30 to 50 milligrams per kilogram of total arsenic, according to the report.

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