Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Debate on Polycarbonates

At first I ignored the whole polycarbonate scare assuming it was the stuff of paranoid, pampered mommies with too much time on their hands. I now regret that.

For eight months, we fed Sam out of Avent bottles. When she was about 9 months, we stopped giving her bottles and started exclusively breastfeeding because she was feeding less and I abhored pumping. But now she is just a few days before her first birthday and she is back on bottles again. We have tried sippy cups, believe me. But she will not have it. In fact she became dehydrated last week after refusing to drink our of anything but a bottle. Turns out toddlers have more willpower than Gandhi when it comes to hunger/thirst strikes. And so we gave in. She is off the breast, though. So, what we were to do?

In the months that followed our bottle moratoriam, I started to wish I had paid more attention to the polycarbonate stuff. As the EU actually banned them and more and more new reports and scientist friends of R's told us that there really is something to the fears. The bottles leach toxins into the liquid poured into them. No one is sure how much or what effects it has, but when dealing with our children, how much is too much? I say any is too much.

R and I spent about two days freaking out, wondering what we have done to our daughter by not listening to the first reports and then we took action. We gathered up all of our polycarbonate sippy cups, bottles and Nalgenes and tossed them into storage. Last night we went out and bought these born free bottles. If we use bottles with the new baby, they are all we will use, unless we also use glass. I figure better safe than sorry. So for us it is Born Free or die. Maybe we should live in New Hampshire.

1 comment:

Kristi said...

I will admit to dismissing this for the same reasons you described in your first few lines. But now, I'm worried after reading the rest of your post. I'm going to do some research on this, and if you have time and wouldn't mind, please pass on the links to anything you've found.