Plastic Bottled Water and Cancer

While there are many problems with bottled water, one of the largest is the fact that it’s not regulated the same as tap water. Now, you know tap water isn’t always the tastiest choice of hydration, and bottled water provides some convenience as well as the benefit of tasting good. However, is it really worth the taste knowing that same water, teeming with chemicals, can cause cancer? Tap water has strict regulations to follow, and not only is it given rules, but those rules as well as whether your tap water follows those rules is readily available to you. Bottled water is a private business, and being a private business, is not obligated to tell you all the details of what is in the water, where it came from, and what processes were used to make it. In fact, many kinds of bottled water are just tap water put into plastic containers! It seems pretty silly to be drinking bottled water when you’re paying 1,900 times more for it than tap water.

The problem with bottled water is that most of them are contaminated with everything from fertilizer residues and disinfection byproducts to pain medication and awful chemical cocktails. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) did a study on ten brands of bottled water ranging in source from California and North Carolina to Virginia and even Washington DC. 38 contaminants were found in these bottles of water, each brand containing about 8. In one of the brands, there were high levels of cancer-causing contaminants. These levels were high enough to spur a lawsuit requiring warning labels to be placed on this water. At the University of Missouri, a study was done on bottled water and its effect on breast cancer cell proliferation. It was found with one brand of bottled water that the cancer cells grew 78% faster than the control sample. The reason for this is that there are certain contaminants found in water that mimic estrogen, which is one of the studied reasons for breast cancer occurrence. These are called xenoestrogens, often found in bottled water.

So what do you do about drinking bottled water when it’s so convenient and seemingly inexpensive? There are two things to do to solve this problem. The first is to get an ionizer for your water. This will filter your water turning it into alkaline water. Alkaline water has health benefits including the deterrence of free radical production. Free radicals are what cause the body to age and the reason for degenerative diseases, one of which is cancer. By drinking alkaline water, you effectively slow the aging process, and decrease your chances of disease. The other thing that needs to be changed is the container in which you hold your water. Instead of plastic, which can also aid in cancer, you should use a stainless steel container. Even aluminum containers are dangerous due to aluminum’s connection with Alzheimer’s disease. By drinking safe water in a safe container, you help your body become healthier, prevent cancer, and aid in making the environment cleaner.