When faced with the recent news that over 91% of Canadians showed some measure of BPA levels in their blood, my top question was “Ok then – how do I get it out of my body?”

A simple search on the internet is not enough. It yields blog posts and articles like the ones I just wrote about avoiding BPA; not actually evacuating it from your system. Then I was lucky enough to find this Scientific American article on the persistence of BPA, and where it tends to reside.

Upshot? Large amounts of BPA will leave your body after a few hours of being ingested, but the rest will remain in your fat tissue. In addition, it will cause a drop in adiponectin, a crucial hormone excreted by fat that regulates blood sugar levels. Essentially, BPA starts a vicious chain reaction in which it stores itself in fat, then makes it harder for you to lose weight.

The first step in getting rid of it is what so many people cover in the green blogosphere; avoiding it. Buy food in glass jars, preferably with BPA-free lids. Can your own tomatoes and other acidic foods. Avoid canned foods altogether. Store food in glass containers and ban the plastic water bottles and food storage containers. Avoid packaged foods. Eat more fresh vegetables.

This isn’t all easy stuff. We are programmed to go to the grocery store, buy our ingredients for recipes in cans and make food, or buy food premade for us in boxes and toss it in the oven to heat it up. We essentially have to rewrite the program entirely and start over again.

The next step is to exercise, exercise, exercise. The less fat you have on your body, the less likely you are to store BPA. If you are obese and you were eating a lot of canned foods in the past, chances are good that you have higher than normal BPA levels. So this just gives you another reason to lose weight. And once you start exercising and the BPA starts leaving your system, you will lose weight faster. Bonus. Another excuse to crank out the Wii Fit…