Bottled Water Contains 3 Times More Nanoplastics Than Tap

0:00Hi, I'm Helen Billings, a reporter with The Epic Times, one of America's largest independent newspapers. Today we're going over a new study which shows us that bottled water can contain up to three times as much plastics as tap water. Whether it's microplastics or nanoplastics, it could put our health at risk, and we'll explain why in this episode. Be sure to stick around, but first show your support for independent journalism by following this podcast. So this study was published in January in a journal called Science of the Total Environment. Researchers used high-resolution imaging and other tools to test bottled versus tap water. They tested tap water from four different treatment plants near Lake Erie, along with six different brands of bottled water. Only one brand had less plastics than the tap water. The rest had up to three times as many nanoplastic particles. So why might this be an issue? It's because these plastic particles can bring serious health risks by entering our organs

1:02and damaging cells. Now, scientists are still looking into the effects, but the emerging research has already shown some pretty concerning results. For example, microplastics have been linked to conditions like oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and increased risks of cardiovascular disease and metabolic issues. That's because microplastics get stuck in your body's organs, places like your liver and lungs. From there, they can damage your tissue and gut microbiome. So that's for microplastics, but nanoplastics can be even more harmful because they're much smaller and they can pass through the organs into individual cells. To be exact, microplastics are about 0.1 micrometers to 5 millimeters, while nanoplastics are less than 1 micrometer. That's why nanoplastics are more likely to pass through certain defenses like the blood brain barrier, which protects your brain from toxins. So nanoplastics can directly affect your cells and even impair your immune system, deteriorate

2:02tissues, and cause other serious health issues. The leader of the study named Megan Hart had this to say, quote, While we don't really fully understand the human health risks associated with nanoplastic exposure, it's still better to try and mitigate that risk because evidence indicates that they do cause problems, even if we're not fully aware of what those are yet, unquote. All right, so now that we've gone over the difference between bottled and tap water and the health risks, let's find out where this plastic is actually coming from. By the way, here at The Epic Times, my colleagues and I have published health stories like these every day. So if you like our work, consider becoming a subscriber to our newspaper. One of the Epic Times dot com, that's the EP OCH Times dot com and hit the blue subscribe button at the top right or check the link in the notes. So researchers from the study discovered that bottled water often has a lot more plastics than tap, but where exactly is it coming from?

3:02Well what they found is that most of the plastics in bottled water actually come from the packaging itself and more than half of the particles they found were nanoplastics. This concentration of plastics was higher than they anticipated according to Ohio State Professor John Lennhart, who is one of the authors of the study. Lennhart thinks it's because they decided to measure nanoplastics too, which is something that's been overlooked in the research. But back to the findings, we know that the plastics in the bottled water mostly came from the packaging, but researchers were more confused about where the plastics in the tap water came from. They found a variety of plastics in there, some of which are used in clothes, some in packaging and others in building materials. If future research could figure out where these particles are coming from and Professor Lennhart thinks it can improve the water treatment process and in the end help remove plastics from our water. Well thanks for listening to our report, if you'd like to read it in detail the link is in the notes. This is Helen Billings with the Epic Times, I'll see you next time, stay healthy my friends.