TV News Interview on BPA

So yesterday I was asked to get up early in the morning, drive in to the local FOX news studio, and answer some questions about BPA and other plastics additives. Those are chemicals, and I'm a chemist, so I said yes. This is the result:

http://www.q13fox.com/videogallery/69481607/News/Plastics-in-Food#pl-62890122

It's funny how much is not able to be said in that context, but I think I was able to squeak out some of the nuance to the issue. I didn't know they were going to use that particular study to open with, so what you see is my on-the-spot reaction on live TV. Hey, as long as I don't get made fun of by Joel on The Soup I think I'll be pretty happy with this result.

(By the way, the one chemical fact I really wanted to get across but didn't is that there's some good science done by Joseph Thornton in Oregon about how the hormone receptors learned to recognize their hormones, and it turns out they bind by exclusion -- that is, the estrogen receptor isn't really specific for binding estrogen, it's more that it's specific for NOT binding testosterone or cortisol or anything else -- and this gives me a little more pause that maybe BPA might be able to bind, if it's never been specifically excluded before. But I'm still only mildly cautious. We aren't all gonna die, I don't think. Well, not from BPA. The bottom line is that mechanisms of receptor development and hormone binding probably do NOT make for good TV!)