Pop those 'BPA-free' drinking bottles into the dishwasher before using them

(Press-News.org) As part of a laboratory experiment, Rebecca Holmes examined water bottles that had been acquired from abroad expecting to find bisphenol A (BPA), a human-made component commonly found in polycarbonate plastics used to make consumer products.

What she found, however, was that those water bottles were just fine, yet some control bottles purchased in the United States and supposedly BPA-free actually contained traces of the chemical now thought to negatively impact heart health.

Holmes, a researcher formerly in the laboratory of Hong-Sheng Wang, PhD, professor in the University of Cincinnati Department of Pharmacology and Systems Physiology, was working on her master's degree in molecular, cellular and biochemical pharmacology in the College of Medicine at the time.

"We believed that it likely was BPA contaminant on the surface of the bottle," says Holmes, who is now clinical research coordinator at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center. "I thought there is something here. I was thinking people are buying those bottles off the shelves, and they are taking them home and probably not washing them. They are using them so they are consuming BPA."

Holmes, Wang and Jianyong Ma, PhD, a research scientist at UC, decided to test an array of drinking bottles made of Tritan to see if transient BPA was present. Tritan is a BPA-free plastic. They acquired 10 different Tritan bottles and detected BPA release from two kinds of Tritan bottles. The team then tested whether rinsing, handwashing or dishwashing removed the BPA from the Tritan bottles. The results of their study is available in the END