What Does Your Coffee Maker Say About Your Health? BPA Free Brewing

Is Your Coffee Pot Endangering Your Health with BPA toxins?

Does your coffee maker contain BPA?

I’ve been receiving numerous questions about dangerous plastics, and plastic food containers that may or not contain BPA from my readers. These questions are in reply to the most popular post, How to Live BPA Free – Plastic Container Tips.

So I wanted to address some of these questions with resources. This is the first blog post in answering questions about BPA free plastic food containers.

One question was the safety of using coffee makers with plastic parts, something that I never thought of, and prompted me to research the dangers of plastic resin leaching into your morning routine.

According to the Mother Nature Network, “the main problem with BPA is that it’s a synthetic female hormone. It often winds up bonding with some animals’ estrogen receptors, tricking them into producing estrogen-like reactions such as starting puberty in females or shrinking reproductive organs in males.” More research has found that humans have exhibited negative reactions from BPA in their bodies “such as increased aggression in young girls or sexual dysfunction in adult men. But one of BPA’s most troubling side effects is its tendency to cause earlier puberty and breast development in female mice: Both are precursors to breast cancer in humans, and both are also inexplicably happening to the U.S.”

At first, people didn’t think BPA would be a hazard to our health; however, “due to the relatively weak chemical connections, called ester bonds, that link it with its fellow monomers.” Thus these bonds can be broken with heat, an acid or a base such as warming the plastic container in a microwave or through plastic components in a coffee pot.

There are other options for brewing your morning fix, remember your parents’ and grandparents’ method of brewing a “hot cup of Joe”? My grandmother boiled water on the stove and then steeped her coal black coffee in a metal pot. Invest in an eco-friendly coffee pot or French Press for single servings.

Other types of coffee makers and filters that are reported to be BPA free include:

Hamilton Beach Brew Station – according to one source on Lunch.com

Coffee Percolators

Moka Pots

Chemex Coffee Makers (looks like a chemistry tool)

Cold Brew Coffee Maker

Most of the above coffee makers can be purchased on Amazon.com, if not at your local big box stores such as Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Costco and Best Buy. I found more valuable information about plastic coffee pots and other harmful plastics from BadPlastics.com

A better option for a BPA free coffee pot

More info about those “recyclable” resin codes on the bottom of plastic containers from Mother Nature Network (you really should read this entire article – it has a plethora of resources for the dangers of using plastics!)

The No. 7 recycling symbol — representing the coding system’s “Other” category — includes polycarbonate, which makes it the main symbol to avoid for BPA-conscious consumers.

Items bearing the 3 and 6 symbols, while not necessarily brimming with BPA, are also often listed as plastics to avoid since they contain phthalates, a family of napthalene derivatives that are also believed to have hormone-disrupting abilities.

Items with the 1, 2, 4 and 5 symbols are generally considered the “safe plastics.”