Walk into pretty much any gas station in the western world and you will surely see people filling up their travel mugs with hot beverages to drink on the road. While there is certainly nothing wrong with sipping a little hot coffee or tea in the car, you might not be aware of the damage you are doing to yourself. Most people do not even think about it, but there is a chance that the plastic mug that you are drinking out of is leeching toxic chemicals into your body.
In recent years, there has been a lot of buzz and news about how plastic baby bottles contained the harmful chemical BPA, or bisphenol-A. There have been many studies that have shown people have this toxic chemical in their blood, and it doesn’t look good. For this reason, almost all of the baby bottles sold at stores these days are BPA free. The same goes for plastic water bottles. For decades, they were produced with harmful chemicals. It wasn’t until a year or two ago that the producers of these things finally changed the bottles.
For these same reasons, you might be taking in chemicals through your plastic travel mug. To make matters worse, many people use these things for years and years, even they are thoroughly worn out. If your mug looks pretty worn, do yourself a favor and get a new one. These days, you can get BPA free plastic travel mugs, so look out for them. Better yet, try to get one that has a stainless steel interior. For the same reasons why thermoses have stainless steel in the inside to keep liquids hot, mugs made like this will work great and won’t leech any plastic into the hot drink inside. It doesn’t matter if the outside of the mug is made of plastic or not. Only your hand will touch that. It is the inside that matters. Keep in mind that you can use this type of mug to keep things cold also. While travelling, you can easily put it in one of those mini bar fridges at the hotel and pull it out just before you leave.
