Warning issued to everyone who takes receipt when they shop
A doctor says they never touch a receipt.
With the festive season here and shopping lists growing longer, a prominent doctor is urging people to avoid requesting paper receipts, warning of serious health risks.
Longevity specialist Dr Sabine Donnai, founder of the exclusive American health clinic Viavi, has said she refuses to touch receipts and recommends that those who handle them regularly should wear protective gloves.
During an appearance on the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast discussing the dangers of micro-plastics, Dr Donnai disclosed that numerous paper receipts, particularly in the US, contain a dangerous chemical known as Bisphenol-A (BPA), which has been demonstrated to interfere with female hormones, reduce testosterone in men and potentially diminish fertility.
Dr Sabine elaborated: "[When] you produce a hormone... it's almost like a key that needs to get into a key lock to open a door. You have a receptor and the hormone needs to attach to the receptor to actually be effective. Now, what these chemicals often do, they... block these receptors. So you might have sufficient hormones, but they actually can't be activated. [Receipts are] a big source, actually, of BPA exposure and they've definitely seen in people that actually handle receipts very often, they've got very low levels of testosterone levels, they have infertility."
In the United States, BPA levels found on paper receipts are alarmingly high. Groundbreaking research conducted this year discovered that some receipts in California contain sufficient quantities of the chemical that merely holding one for 10 seconds could enable the skin to absorb enough to breach California's safety regulations, reports the Mirror.
The Center for Environmental Health (CEH) identified numerous well-known household retailers of food and clothing as violating these rules.
Whilst Dr Sabine steers clear of all receipts, she acknowledged that occasional contact may not warrant extreme concern: "I'll be the first one to say 'No, I don't want the receipt, I don't wanna touch that' [although] getting a receipt once a day is maybe not a problem."
But for people who must handle receipts more frequently than once daily, Dr Sabine provided some guidance:
"People that work on a till and give out receipts every day, I feel like wanna shout out and say 'Don't do this! Or wear specific gloves like nitrile (latex-free rubber) gloves'."
Unexpectedly, washing hands may offer limited protection against absorption, whilst hand sanitisers can significantly worsen the situation.
"Your likelihood of actually absorbing BPA if you've got hand sanitiser on your hands or you've got hand cream on your hands is about 150 times higher", Dr Sabine explained, as the rubbing action can actually accelerate absorption. In the UK, despite the ban on BPA since 2020, we're not entirely free from harmful chemicals in our receipts.
After the joint prohibition by the UK and the EU, manufacturers have transitioned to Bisphenol-S (BPS), a similar chemical that some health experts caution could present nearly identical risks. However, certain British retailers, such as Co-op, have completely eliminated chemicals like BPS from their receipts.
