Sometimes it seems excessive the sheer amount of things in the world we find to be dangerous. I get it. And in no way are we advocating agoraphobia or crippling fear of anything and everything in your environment. You don’t have to live your life jumping at everything that crosses your path.
The problem is, we live in a mass-produced, manufactured world. And producers don’t care much if what they produce is toxic or not, as long as it sells. So if you can get a fix for the underlying repeat offenders, it goes a long way in helping you segment what is dangerous and what is perfectly safe in your environment. BPA is dangerous, and that’s in a lot of ways. Today’s BPA alert? Grocery store receipts.
Every time you go to Harris Teeter, Starbucks, or anywhere with a receipt and you touch that receipt, you are unknowingly exposed to toxins.
This is because of a simple but frightening fact: 95% of all receipt paper is saturated with bisphenol-A (BPA), a potent carcinogen and endocrine disruptor that first gained infamy as a toxin in plastic containers and water bottles.
BPA is a “fake estrogen” that hijacks your body’s endocrine system and sends it into a tailspin. The ensuing dysfunction can lead to devastating issues with fertility and reproduction, metabolism, immune functioning, sleep, and mood. Studies have linked BPA to over fifty different serious health issues.
How To Tell If Your Receipts Have BPA?
BPA is found traditionally in receipts printed on thermal paper. Because of this, you can do a simple test to see if you have been carrying the dangerous receipts in your wallet/purse:
- Use a coin and lightly scratch the receipt from top to bottom
- Thermal paper is heat sensitive so you will see a distinct line “printed” on the paper indicating a 95% chance BPA is in the receipts coating.
- Regular ink printed receipts are on paper, which will leave no mark other than a slight indentation in the paper itself.
How much should you worry about receipts?
Is worrying about the toxicity of receipts just being overcautious? The unfortunate truth is that they do present a clear and present danger. In fact, studies suggest that exposure to thermal printer receipt paper is one of the primary routes by which BPA enters the body—and once it’s in there, it accumulates over time and causes progressively greater dysfunction.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that they found BPA in over 90% of urine samples that were taken as a representative of the U.S. population. For this reason—and because of the terrifying ease with which endocrine disruptors can disturb the entire body’s balance—many health experts believe that BPA (and its toxic cousins) can be linked to nearly every health issue facing our society.
And speaking of these toxic BPA analogs, some are even more toxic than others. Preliminary research has shown that bisphenol S (BPS) is up to one hundred times more toxic and has an even more negative impact on endocrine function than BPA. Thermal receipt paper contains both of them as well as a number of other analogs, including PBS and BPSIP.
How do you protect yourself?
The easy and obvious answer is to decline receipts whenever they’re offered to you and tell them to email you the receipt if it’s an option.
Make sure your DETOX pathways are open. That means your liver, your colon, your kidneys, and your skin are constantly able to detox since we are bombarded all day every day with toxins.
Do a cellular detox every 3-4 months. This is CRUCIAL if you want to move to the highest level of health. You can’t keep these toxins in, disrupting your cells and increasing your chance of sickness and cancer. The #1 cellular detox in the world is True Cellular Detox. The reason why this is considered one of the best is that it is a 3-part cellular detox rather than just one. Make sure you are doing this once every 3-4 months.
If you haven’t done a detox ever or it’s been 3 months, it’s time. We recommend the True Cellular Detox system.
But I wash my hands immediately and use hand sanitizer?
Research has also shown that the absorption of BPA is highly potentiated by some of the chemicals in hand sanitizers, skin moisturizers, and other industrial cosmetic products. Sometimes these products even carry their own dose of BPA and other endocrine disruptors—so you should avoid them anyway. At the very least, be careful not to use any of these products right before or after touching a receipt. This means that washing and sanitizing your hands after touching a receipt could actually worsen the exposure.
I know, staying healthy is getting harder and harder, isn’t it? Luckily, we live in an electronic age where emailing receipts isn’t just an option, it actually makes keeping track of your purchases much easier.
