Warning issued to anyone that drinks bottles of water
'If water is bad for you then surely everything else is too?' is what most of us are thinking.
But that isn't totally the case.
Water in its purest form is perfectly healthy to drink.
But when you consume a one-litre plastic bottle of water, for example, it happens to contain 240,000 plastic particles.
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And it might come as an even bigger shock that there's only 5.5 plastic particles per one litre of tap water, on average.
Why drinking water from a plastic bottle can be bad for you
Nanoplastics have strong links to cancer, birth defects and fertility problems.
These particles are much smaller than microplastics, which have been previously detected in water bottles, according to research published by the University of Columbia.
With the use of lasers, experts took a close look at particles from three popular brands of water in the US.
The danger with these nanoplastics is that they are so small that they can enter directly into blood cells and the brain.
Plastics used to make water bottles usually contain phthalates, which reportedly contributes to 100,000 premature deaths in the US each year.
And according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, phthalates are 'linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems'.
The team's use of the new laser technology was named Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscopy.
Study co-author Beizhan Yan, an environmental chemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said: "Ironically, this probably comes from plastic filters used to supposedly purify the water before it is bottled.
"Previously this was just a dark area, uncharted. Toxicity studies were just guessing what’s in there.
"This opens a window where we can look into a world that was not exposed to us before."
"People developed methods to see nano particles, but they didn’t know what they were looking at," added the study’s lead author, Naixin Qian, a Columbia graduate student in chemistry.
How to safely drink water
According to Simplex Health, 'the only guaranteed way to get pure water is through steam distillation by using a water distiller'.
"Distilled water is 99.8 percent pure, which means it is purer that any bottled or tap water and purer than using any other type of filtration or purification method. Water is gently boiled to kill off viruses and bacteria," they explain.
"The steam produced is captured in a stainless steel coil where it cools to form pure water.
"This passes through an activated charcoal filter to remove any trace impurities. It is recommended, to add minerals back to the water, as during the distillation process the water is purified to a point that it could be lacking these essential minerals.
"This intensive process can have an effect on the taste of water, which may not be to everyone's liking."
Topics: Food And Drink, Health
Anish Vij