Some More Articles

I recently received a question from one of my readers about
the safety of drinking water from clear plastic water
bottles. These bottles, made from Lexan polycarbonate resin
(a plastic polymer), are widely used for single-serving
sales to one-gallon of water in stores and home-delivery
bottles.

Theee bottles appear to be safe because they do not impart
any taste or odor to the water. Lexan polycarbonate is also
used to make compact discs and DVDs, bulletproof windows,
mobile phones, and computers.

The water delivery company sent my reader a notice saying
that their Lexan polycarbonate bottles are perfectly safe to
use. They suggested their customers visit a website that was
designed to portray this plastic in a positive light.

But, actually, a toxic chemical is lurking in these bottles
that does end up in the water you drink. Lexan used to be
used to make baby bottles, but these are no longer sold.
Hmmmmm…

STAY AWAY FROM BPA

In 1998, Dr. Patricia Hunt of Case Western University in
Ohio discovered that one of the components of Lexan
polycarbonate resin–bisphenol-A (BPA)–can leach into water
from water bottles. BPA is a potent hormone disruptor. It
can impair the reproductive organs and have adverse effects
on ****** tissue and prostate development.

Who do we believe? The water delivery company or Dr. Hunt?

I’m inclined to go with Dr. Hunt. I went to a website
maintained by the authors of Our Stolen Future: How We Are
Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival, who
are continuously searching the scientific literature for
information on endochrine disruptors. The Our Stolen Future
([http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/NewScience/oncompounds/bisp]
page on bisphenol-a henola/bpauses.htm#recentimportant)
gives a whole page of links to scientific studies that show
that BPA damages the endocrine system in a variety of ways.

BPA can leach from water bottles when exposed to heat and
cleaning agents, but detectable levels of BPA can also leach
into water from bottles just sitting at room temperature,
according to a 2003 study conducted by the University of
Missouri published in the journal Environmental Health
Perspectives.

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY

Is there is a level of BPA that may be acceptable? To answer
that question we have to ask: acceptable to who? A healthy
male? A woman? A child? The elderly? And how would you know
how much leaching has occurred in the water? It could easily
vary from day to day depending on how long the water had
been in the bottle, whether or not the sun was shining on
the bottle in the delivery truck, and a variety of other
factors.

I’m concerned enough about the possible danger of BPA that I
am no longer purchasing bottled water in plastic bottles.

Health concerns aside, plastic is also not good for the
environment. Americans use about 10 million tons of plastic
every year, but recycle only about two percent of it. A
plastic milk jug takes about one million years to
biodegrade. And, getting back to health concerns, the
manufacture of plastics produces toxic wastes that return to
us indirectly through polluted air, water, and soil.

But we also have to use common sense and choose the greatest
benefit at any given time. If your choice was to drink
spring water in the polycarbonate bottle or drink tap water
or drink no water at all on a hot summer day, I would say
drink the purer spring water in the polycarbonate bottle.
Once in a while, a single exposure will not do much harm.
But you don’t want to be using water contained in a Lexan
polycarbonate resin bottle as your everyday source of water
supply, or drink from these bottles all day long, every
day.

There are other options.

BETTER OPTIONS

My best recommendation is to get a good water filter that is
right for your water and filter your water at home. That way
there is no questionable leaching at all. Even though this
may be expensive, it is one of the best investments you can
make in your health and will save thousands of dollars in
medical expenses in the long run.

For those of you who carry or purchase water in the small,
single-serving Lexan polycarbonate bottles, you can purchase
plastic-free refillable bottles in various sizes to suit
your needs. They are lightweight and much more attractive
than the disposable plastic bottles.

It’s a good idea, particularly in the summertime, to carry
clean water with you, as your body needs water throughout
the day for good health. The Mayo Clinic suggests you divide
your weight in half and drink that many ounces of water
every day. So if you weigh 128 pounds, that would be 64
ounces or 8 8-ounce glasses of water per day. It’s better to
carry your own clean water in a safe container than drink
tap water or water in a plastic bottle.

For sources of water filters and reusable plastic-free
refillable bottles, visit
http://www.debraslist.com/water/index.html.

In this article, Mike Adams puts the dangers and myths surrounding plastic water bottles into perspective and offers helpful tips on selecting water filters. Mike Adams is the founder of NaturalNews.com.

Kevin: Well, Mike, I want to welcome you to this call.

Mike: Hey, Kevin.. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me join this program.

Kevin: It’s an absolute honor and there are probably a few people who don’t know who you are, or maybe haven’t heard of some of the stuff that you’ve done before. So why don’t we give everyone just a brief introduction and then we’ll move right into the water aspect. We have a lot of stuff to cover today.

Mike: Okay, sure. Well, I’m the founder and editor of Natural News.com. It’s a website to reaches now well over a million readers a month with news, headlines, alerts, warnings about everything to do with natural health and the benefits of natural medicine and the potential dangers of pharmaceuticals and conventional medicine. It’s just a great informational resource. I love doing that.

Kevin: If anyone hasn’t gone over there to naturalnews.com you’ll find a whole bunch of great stuff and it’s nice to read some of it, because it’s very refreshing. That’s what I found.

Mike: We can pull our punches. We tell it like it is and I try to maintain a lot of informed skepticism about what I’m writing about, so I’m always doing independent product reviews and things like that to the readers.

Kevin: We’re going to talk a little bit about skepticism, because we’ve already prepped for this call, but what I want to start with is, since we’re talking about water I want about talk about something is so prevalent in our media now and probably will be for a while and it’s the use of plastic as applied to water. So water bottles, even in cooking or microwaving plastic containers and all that, let’s talk about some of the things that we should be concerned about when we’re dealing with plastic bottles.

Mike: Well, I think people are very well aware of the Bisphenol A danger, BPA as it’s called. There has been a lot of press recently about this chemical in plastic bottles and baby bottles. Did you hear that, I think it was Toys “R” Us is going to stop selling baby bottles made with that chemical now?

Kevin: Wow.

Mike: That was an interesting development, but like a lot of stories in the press it’s very hard to put into context. I think people need to be aware of the proper context for this potential risk. Yes, these plastic bottles contain BPA. Yes, if you drink water that’s vigorously shaken in these bottles, which it all is done during shipping, by the way and you do that for 10 or 20 years, then sure, it probably increases your risk for cancer, but I want to make people aware that drinking a can of soda is far more toxic, probably orders of magnitude more toxic to your body than drinking a bottle of water from a plastic bottle. Eating food that was cooked in Teflon, in my view, is orders of magnitude more toxic than drinking something of a plastic bottle or eating hydrogenated oils or fried foods or things like that or smoking a cigarette. You could probably drink a thousand bottles of water that were from plastic bottles and it would be less toxic to you than smoking one cigarette. So you’ve got to put this into perspective. I drink out of plastic bottles from time to time. It’s not my first choice, but I do it when I’m traveling and I don’t freak out about it.

Kevin: Yeah. I know that the number seven bottle has come under fire recently. Is that the only one to be somewhat concerned about, or is it across the board?

Mike: No. It’s across the board.

Kevin: Okay..

Mike: As I understand it, the lower the number the more toxic the bottles can be. You don’t want to drink of the really cheap bottles, which are often number two or number three. The seven is better than the lower numbers and you certainly don’t want to be feeding your baby - really, if there’s one area to be legitimately concerned, it’s with infants and children, but as an adult if you are taking a lot of anticancer nutrients and you’re eating sprouts and you’re taking some super foods, you’re exercising and getting vitamin D, then the occasional drink out of a plastic bottle is nothing to be alarmed about.

Kevin: What about alternatives, like the stainless steel water bottles, or say, something like a glass lined thermos?

Mike: I think glass is great to drink out of. That’s what I usually do. I even take that to the gym, even though they don’t like the fact that I’m carrying around a glass bottle.

Kevin: Right.

Mike: For obvious reasons, but some people are drinking out of aluminum bottles, which I think is crazy. How is aluminum better than plastic? Stainless steel is definitely the better way to go in all of this. When you get stainless steel you want steel that has low nickel content, because there are different types of stainless steel. They’re made with chromium and nickel and whatever and they’re all alloys. So you want low nickel content, because everything that’s in that steel, eventually some of it gets in your body and nickel is not a great nutrient to have in large quantities for sure.

Kevin: Right. Do you know how you would know if it’s got low nickel? I guess a hip company would put that out there.

Mike: You can go online and search for the stainless steel number. For example, a lot of stainless steel is number 420 or something. The 420 means that it has a certain percentage, I think like 5% nickel and 13% chromium or something like that. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I know you can find it. So find out the stainless steel number. Like stainless steel number 380 or 420 or something like that.