These days, bottled water is all over the world. It’s very rare that a person drinks straight from the tap any more.
As for the kinds of drinking bottles used, while some personal water bottles have a metal casing inside to keep the liquid cool or hot (think of “thermos”), most are divided into glass bottles and plastic bottles.
Most plastic products, from sippy cups to food wraps, can release chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen, according to a study in Environmental Health Perspectives.
The study found these chemicals even in products that didn’t contain bisphenol A (BPA), a compound in certain plastics that has been widely criticized because it mimics estrogen.
Many plastic products are now marketed as BPA-free, and manufacturers have begun substituting other chemicals whose effects aren’t as well known.
Between 2010 – 2013, researchers in Austin, TX bought more than 450 plastic items from stores including Walmart and Whole Foods.
They chose products designed to come in contact with food — things like baby bottles, deli packaging and flexible bags, says George Bittner, one of the study’s authors and a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin.
The testing showed that more than 70 percent of the products released chemicals that acted like estrogen. And that was before they exposed the stuff to real-world conditions: simulated sunlight, dishwashing, and microwaving, Bittner says.
In a more recent study, researchers at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany used bottles that were made from a different plastic, the type used in most single-use water bottles.
The researchers washed out used water bottles made from either polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or glass and then cultured young mud snails in them.
The species actually