How Scared Should You Be of Bisphenol A?

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of hubbub in the news over the chemical bisphenol A. They say it's in a lot of baby products, like bottles and sippy cups and hard plastic water bottles, too. But I can't tell if this is really a big deal or just an overblown chemical panic. What's the Green Lantern's take on BPA?

You can be forgiven for being confused: There's a huge mountain of data out there about bisphenol A, and every day it seems as if a new study comes along linking the chemical to a new, scary condition. Parsing through the information is a Sisyphean task.

It's certainly true that we're all regularly exposed to BPA, a synthetic chemical primarily used as an ingredient in the hard plastic called polycarbonate and in the epoxy resins that line most food and soft drink cans. Small amounts of the chemical can leach from containers into our food, which may explain why a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 93 percent of Americans over the age of 6 had detectable amounts of BPA in their urine.

(Read the rest of this article [2] in Slate [3].)