It will certainly have happened to you to read the acronym BPA on some products and accessories that you use every day, but you do not have very clear the meaning, in this article we will try to explain it, specifying also what BPA-free means.
BPA is bisphenol, a chemical substance that is mainly used in association with other chemical substances for the production of resins and plastics.
It is used, for example, in polycarbonate, a type of hard, transparent and high quality plastic, used for the production of containers for food use such as bottles, baby bottles, plastic crockery and containers for storing food.
BPA can also migrate in small quantities in foods and beverages that are stored using containers that contain it.
Is BPA harmful to health?
Last year EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, had already expressed itself on the danger of bisphenol A by reassuring consumers. According to the experts, in fact, at the current levels of exposure of the population (including newborns, adolescents and pregnant women), there is no danger to health, because exposure through diet and all the others sources (dust, cosmetics and thermal paper) is clearly below the safety level, the so-called "tolerable daily intake".
Although new data and new detection methods have led EFSA experts to considerably reduce the safety level of bisphenol A from 50 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day to 4 micrograms, the highest estimates of aggregate exposure (feed plus other sources) are 3 to 5 times lower than the new tolerable daily dose.