If you need to encourage anyone to ditch the bottled water habit, here's a little motivation: It could lead to a bad sex life. A recent study of Chinese factory workers who were exposed to high doses of bisphenol A (BPA) on the job found they had a higher occurrence of sexual problems including lower sexual desire, impotence and even satisfaction. The study, published by the journal Human Reproduction, reported that the men exposed to high levels of BPA were four times more likely to experience erectile dysfunction than other factory workers in the same town.
While there's no need for the average person to be alarmed -- the men in the study had BPA levels 50 times that of the norm for American men -- it does bring more attention to the importance of limiting exposure.
The FDA still calls the trace amounts that leach out of plastic bottles and canned food safe. But with study after study linking BPA to reproductive and nervous system issues not to mention prostate and breast cancers, heart attacks and diabetes, the FDA is taking another look. In the meantime, stay away from bottled water and choose a BPA-free refillable bottle for drinking tap on the go instead.
Photo by Phil Dragash on flickr used under a Creative Commons License
Why are you showing a PET plastic bottle and mistating that it contains BPA? There's no BPA in self-service plastic bottles or any of the thousands of products packaged in PET plastic.
The polycarbonate plastic that is hardened with BPA has been verified as safe by the FDA since the 1970s. Please don't mis-represent the science. The Chinese workers were directly exposed to the chemical BPA in prolonged, massive doses that do not reflect the infintessimal exposure found in normal American life.