Plastic Problems

The SOLUTION! – We have plastic problems, but there’s an easy way to tell WHICH plastics are safe and which are not, so we can discard them from our kitchens and avoid eating or drinking out of them.

In the December 6th edition of the New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof writes, “What if breast cancer in the United States has less to do with insurance or mammograms and more to do with contaminants in our water or air, or in certain plastic containers in our kitchens? What if the surge in asthma and childhood leukemia reflect, in part, the poisons we impose upon ourselves?”

One example of this conundrum is that most Asian women have low rates of breast cancer as long as they live in Asia, but Asian women born and raised in the US somehow lose this protection. Kristof quotes cancer researcher Alisan Goldfarb as saying, “If an Asian woman moves to New York, her daughters will be [as vulnerable to breast cancer as whites are]. It is something to do with the environment.”

It turns out that some plastics are dangerous (especially if you heat them in the microwave or dishwasher), while others are much less so. How can we identify the bad kinds of plastic? Safer plastics are those marked (usually at the bottom of a container) 1, 2, 4 or 5, while the plastics to avoid are those numbered 3, 6 and 7 (unless they are also marked “BPA-free”).

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