Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff: All about BPAs About this episode Are BPAs safe? Of course not. Does the FDA care? Of course not. Learn all about what and why today.
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Josh Clark? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, one for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at O D O O dot com. That's Odoo dot com.
0:32 Speaker 02 Granger knows if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need, when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.
1:06 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. So this is short stuff about the beware of the BPA's.
1:17 Speaker 03 That's right. We're talking about BPA's, specifically, well, BPA, which is, how do you pronounce that, Josh?
1:25 Josh Clark? I'm going with bisphenol or bisphenol A.
1:28 Speaker 03 Bisphenol A. There are other bisphenols, apparently, which I didn't know. And apparently, you know, none of these are good for you, even though the FDA is like, it's fine in the amounts that you're getting it.
1:40 Josh Clark? Stop being so uptight, everybody. Yeah, they're used in all sorts of plastics, polycarbonate in particular, but that stuff shows up everywhere. It can be in the stuff that lines tin cans. It can be in your dental work. It can be in contact lens, storage containers, baby bottles. Used to be. I don't think it is anymore, but it was everywhere. It's also now, still today, the greatest exposure that people get on average is from holding receipts, thermal paper receipts.
2:14 Speaker 03 Oh, interesting.
2:15 Josh Clark? Those are coated with BPA. So just be aware of that. I saw a study that said just holding one for 10 seconds exposes you to unsafe levels of BPA.
2:26 Speaker 03 You know, many years ago, when we lived in Los Angeles, and it's a joke Emily still laughs at to this day, because it's just very me, very sardonically Chuck, was we left a Blockbuster video, and it was like, print, print, print, and they did that thing where there was a ticker tape of like, three feet of receipts, each, you know, connected by a little tiny piece of paper.
2:48 Josh Clark? Right.
2:49 Speaker 03 And he handed them to me, and I just went, "Thank you for the receipts." And Emily thought that was the funniest thing ever, and she still says it to this day.
2:55 Josh Clark? Yeah, I could see being in the right place and the right frame of mind and just finding that awesome.
3:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, like, really stoned at Blockbuster?
3:04 Josh Clark? Sure. Do you remember what you rented?
3:07 Speaker 03 Oh, no, no, no, who knows? But now that I, I don't feel so bad now that I know that those things are loaded with BPAs, I don't want those in my pocket.
3:16 Josh Clark? No, you don't. And the reason why we're even like, talking about BPA, is all thanks to a geneticist named Dr. Patricia Hunt, who was studying the ovaries of mice, back in the late 90s, 1998, that was her jam. She was not looking for BPA, she was not studying BPA at all, but BPA came and found her, essentially.
3:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, she saw these chromosomal errors start popping up. They went from 2% to 40% in these mice that she was studying, in the control group, and that, you know, there was miscarriage, there were birth defects in these little baby mice, it's all very sad. And she ran some more tests, and she was like, "You know what? All of these cages in water bottles, that these mice are drinking out of, have BPA in them, and I think that's where it's coming from." So she swapped that stuff out with non-BPA stuff, everything returned to normal, and she was like, "I think I found something really bad here, everybody."
4:14 Josh Clark? Yeah, she did. She also really started to examine what BPA did, disrupted fetal development, the eggs of the fetus that had its development disrupted, that fetus's eventual babies, those were also disrupted as well. So, yeah, she was like, "I think something is really bad here." And what she turned up is that- BPA acts as an endocrine disruptor, meaning it mimics a hormone in our body, which does all sorts of stuff because our hormones are very, very well precisely timed. And you go over here and do this, you go over here and do that. And if something shows up en masse and is like, we're going to do all of this at once. There's all sorts of catastrophic things that can happen to the human body.
5:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. And in this case, in the case of BPA, what it really does is affect estrogen. And estrogen has a huge effect on a lot of stuff. I think it can affect the behavior of more than 200 genes. And almost every organ and tissue in the body can be affected by estrogen. So this was a big deal. At the time, there were a lot of initial reactions of like, you know, we're not sure how bad this stuff is for you. We're not going to do anything right now. Like, the evidence is like, not really conclusive because we're not mice. And so we're not necessarily going to experience the same health effects. And again, these limits are like,
5:42 Speaker 03 the amount that we're getting shouldn't harm like, you know, children and adults.
5:47 Josh Clark? Right. That was wrong. It turns out that the limits that we were being exposed to were considered harm or are considered very harmful now. But what's something weird, just a little thing to kind of put aside. It actually turns out that low doses of BPA have worse effects than larger doses of BPA.
6:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's weird.
6:07 Josh Clark? I didn't see anywhere that that was explained. So I came up with my own explanation. It's Three Stooges syndrome, which is how, remember Mr. Burns had every disease, but none of them were affecting him because they were all trying to get through the same door at once. I think that's what happens. When you have a bunch of BPA, they all get stuck trying to get through the same door at the same time. And it doesn't affect you like a little bit does, which can make it right through the door.
6:33 Speaker 03 All right, Dr. Clark. We're going to take a break and ponder that. And we'll be right back with more on BPAs.
6:49 Speaker 04 In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
7:13 Speaker 05 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
7:15 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
7:18 Speaker 03 That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
7:34 Speaker 05 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
7:42 Josh Clark? That includes Field Services Manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
7:48 Speaker 06 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
7:54 Speaker 03 And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
7:57 Speaker 06 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.
8:02 Speaker 05 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
8:05 Josh Clark? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
8:23 Speaker 03 I gotta say, I'm very impressed.
8:25 Josh Clark? Thank you, but I feel like I should say I am not a doctor, and you really shouldn't listen to me with any medical stuff whatsoever.
8:31 Speaker 03 But I called you a doctor.
8:33 Josh Clark? Oh, well, then I'm a doctor.
8:36 Speaker 03 All right, so in the United States, the FDA is who is in charge of regulating the BPA use. And in 2010, they did a four-year review of BPA studies, which resulted in 2014, basically saying, you know what? We're upholding our previous no-observe adverse effects level, label, as long as you don't get more than five milligrams. A body weight, per kilogram of body weight per day, you'll be fine.
9:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I think that that is a level that most people are never exposed to, right?
9:11 Speaker 03 Well, that's what they say. I mean, we should talk about some of the things, though. I know you mentioned a few things, but let me see here. Type 2 diabetes potentially in adults, insulin resistance in children and adults, polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity and hypertension in children and adults.
9:29 Josh Clark? Yeah, a lot of terrible stuff. And again, this is not to mention like the preterm births, developmental abnormalities, like all sorts of different stuff that has to do with reproduction, breast cancer, tumors. Like all of these things, like it used to be like, like you said, we're not mice and, you know, that whole settled science BS that like the merchants of doubt used to put out like just shamelessly. Like if you look at meta analyses of studies about BPA and its effect on the human body, like you said, that's what comes up. It's, it's obviously you can never prove anything like without a shadow of a doubt. That's just how science works.
10:09 Josh Clark? But it's essentially to the point where you, the individual person can feel pretty good about not wanting BPA in anywhere near you.
10:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. Europe, of course, is, is leading the way in front of us in April, just a few years ago in 2023. Their FDA, which is the European Food Safety Authority, said, all right, we've seen the research. And I think they, they lowered their safe level a lot, I think, to, to point to, what is that, 2.2 nanograms, which is 2 billionths of a gram or 0.2 billionths of a gram
10:45 Josh Clark? Right.
10:46 Speaker 03 per day for like, you know, a human body. So that's, that's way lower than ours is.
10:53 Josh Clark? Well, yeah, and it's even lower than what their previous one was. Their previous one was still way lower than ours. So ours was 5mg per kilogram. I think it's the same still. Their old one was 4mg per kilogram of body weight. So now it's their, their new Advised safe level is 20,000 times lower than their own previous safe level. 10 billion trillion ish times lower than our our safe level in the United States. And when they, when the European Food Safety Authority basically decided this, there were all sorts of like, like, you know, is this true? Is this right? You know, and of course, industry was pushing back on it.
11:38 Josh Clark? The only paper I found that was critical of it, an academic journal paper that was critical of their, their, their methods of, of data collection. I was like funded this. It was funded by the American Chemistry Council. So they're like, it seems pretty like the, the EFSA has over the years or since April 2023, continued to issue defenses of its decision. And not like, we decided, so shut up. They're like, we decided, and here's why. We decided. Here's all the data we did this on. So it seems pretty legitimate that they're like, this is way worse than, than we have been taking it, and especially in the United States.
12:22 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, if you go to the FDA website today, what's the date? April 30th, 2026. It says FDA's current perspective based on its most recent safety assessment is that BPA is safe at the current levels occurring in foods. Based on FDA's ongoing safety review of scientific evidence, the available information continues to support the safety of BPA for the currently approved uses in food containers and packaging. But if you don't buy that, and I don't, I don't think Dr. Josh does. You need to look for a label that says BPA free. That will indicate that the plastic does not have bisphenol. Bisphenol, is that what you said?
13:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, you did it.
13:03 Speaker 03 Bisphenol A. But like I said, it could have bisphenol F or bisphenol S or something else, and that may be just as risky. I don't, I don't know.
13:12 Josh Clark? Here's how you remember that. It's like a bisque made of polyphenol.
13:18 Josh Clark? There you go.
13:19 Speaker 03 Oh, I love bisque. That's a shame.
13:22 Josh Clark? Yeah. So if you're like, okay, BPA free. Great. Give it to me. It turns out, like you said, there's other bisphenols, bisphenol F and S are now used as substitutes. They're not nearly as studied as BPA has been, but essentially the studies that are coming back are like, yep, just as bad as BPA does all the same things. So essentially the focus on BPA itself should have been expanded from the outset to bisphenols, not just BPA. And so, yeah, now there's BPF and BPS all over the place. And if you think that you, what you have is BPA free, it probably still has bisphenols in it.
14:00 Speaker 03 I don't think you just find something else.
14:02 Josh Clark? Well, they did. It's called glass. But the problem is glass, stainless steel containers, they often come with plastic tops and lids. And you have to be careful with that, too, because even if the lid's metal, it may still have a plastic liner on the top of it. And that probably has at least some sort of plastic associated with it that could be getting in whatever you're drinking out of the.
14:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, but do you have to have a bisphenol to have plastic at all?
14:29 Josh Clark? I don't know. I guarantee if you really looked into it, it's like half a cent less than something safe.
14:36 Speaker 03 That's your answer.
14:37 Josh Clark? You know?
14:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:39 Josh Clark? One day we're going to get there, Chuck. I hope we're still alive to see it. But one day we're going to get there where people actually take care of other people. And we all care about one another. We all act like it. We're going to get there.
14:51 Speaker 03 That's right. And in the meantime, you and I and every other member of the Stuff You Should Know Army is going to try and be squeezing through that same door together.
14:58 Josh Clark? That's right. Also, in the meantime, short stuff is out.
15:05 Speaker 07 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Previous Eels Alive! Next The 1993 Waco Siege Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated