Green Living Baby, The Bottle Conundrum

The public outcry over BPA, Bisphenol A, leaching into baby bottles got parents thinking. Green living doesn’t need to be a top priority to see the value in investing in glass baby bottles. Wee Go has created safe glass bottles with a protective plastic layer that will keep your bottle from breaking. The outer layer still lets you see and measure the amount of liquid in the bottle, making it convenient and safe. BPA caused such a scare due to its detrimental effect on humans, and in particular babies. Human’s most vulnerable state of development is during infancy.

The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences rates BPA as having “some concern for its impact on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children”. BPA enters the bloodstream typically through food containers that have been exposed to heat. A study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention tested over 2500 individuals six and older, with 93% of the population containing measurable levels of BPA.

BPA can be found in plastic and canned food containers. Glass, ceramic, and stainless steel are the recommended BPA-free options. Aluminum, originally touted as BPA free, has actually been found to contain BPA and leach metals into food and drink after being exposed to heat. Due to the delicate nature of infants, glass bottles are the way to go.

The downside is that glass bottles are heavier for both the parents and the baby, and they can break. Relative to the developmental damage posed by BPA, these are more inconveniences than threats. The Wee Go bottle has been highlighted in trend-setting and parenting magazines over the past years, and parents have given the bottles excellent reviews.

When profiling bottle options for your baby, disregard BPA-free statements since many have recently been proven false. Selecting glass bottles that are easily replaceable in the case that it does break will help not only your green living regime, but also protect your baby’s health.

You may also want to review your own food containers, aluminum, canned food containers, water bottles, plastic food containers, and films have all demonstrated traces of BPA. Green living enthusiasts that may be measuring their chemical body burden may want to invest solely in paper, glass, and stainless steel food containers. The threat of BPA is greatest for infants, but adults should be equally aware, as their sources for exposure are quite high.

Protecting your baby’s feeding cycle and your own can keep you both healthy and chemical free. Green living takes dedication and keeping up on the facts. Health authorities like the NIH, NIEHS, and the CDC can help keep your head on straight with all of the health scares swirling around. Wee Go and other glass products can help protect you and your family’s future.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Wee Go

Wrap your baby up in renewable resources

The clothes, blankets, and bibs that surround a baby during early developmental phases are safer when sourced from renewable resources.

With that button nose and those big pudgy cheeks, is your baby swaddled in renewable resources? Baby clothes fly into the market with adorable animals designs and favorite cartoon characters, yet what we may not realize is what’s woven into the fabric. The majority of clothes on the market today are made with synthetic materials or harvested through a process extremely dependent upon them. So although a baby’s physical footprint is small, the footprint of their clothes, blankets, and bibs may be obscenely high. We typically choose baby clothes and products based on their “softness”, an important thing for our precious little ones. This has resulted in an array of cotton, bamboo, and synthetic fabrics. Let’s take a look at what that means for your baby and our environment.

Cotton requires an intense amount of pesticides when conventionally harvested. This dependency keeps it from being truly one of the renewable resources that we look for when designing green lifestyles. Outside of just the harvesting and environmental impact of conventional cotton, is the possible impact on your baby. There are a limited number of studies reviewing chemicals used on crops and their subsequent health impacts when manufactured into something that sits consistently close to the human body. At present, there are few conclusive studies but when you think it through you can understand the possibility.

With millions of gallons of pesticide being used to maintain productive cotton crops, the plant will intake a portion of those chemicals. Studies continue to come out on our “chemical body burden” explaining how chemical exposures through the air, body products, clothes and our environment actually cause the build-up of chemicals in our systems. During the fragile developmental stages of a baby, it would be wise to swaddle, dress, and feed them in clothes that are free from these chemicals. Two simple solutions are buying organic cotton, which can be harvested and made in the US and is a more true renewable resource. Organic bamboo, which is almost always a product of Southeast Asia, is another option and is considered a renewable resource because of its quick growth cycle. They both promise reduced chemical exposure for your baby, and a significantly lower ecological cost.

Synthetic materials, such as polyester are also on the rise. As we become increasingly more adept at creating softer and lighter fabrics the options expand significantly. Yet most of these synthetic ingredients are byproduct of petroleum or other crude manufacturing processes. After learning about harmful offgasing of certain materials, Europe and the United States have put in place higher standards on what can be utilized in clothing. But as our chemical manipulations grow exponentially, it is difficult for regulating bodies to keep up. Personally, I stay away from synthetic materials as often as possible since the health risks are understudied and their resource use can be astronomical. It is very dependent upon the type of material used, how it is manufactured, and where it was originally sourced.

So keep your little one safe with organic cotton and bamboo fibers.