Researchers tested 3 famous brands of bottled water for nanoplastics and made a shocking discovery

People usually believe that packaged drinking water is safer for consumption than regular tap water. In the past 10 years, bottled water sales have dramatically increased in the country. A survey on Statista revealed that people in the United States purchased 15.9 billion gallons of bottled water in 2022. However, a recent study has confirmed that packaged water is not as safe as we believe. There are microscopic elements in bottled water that can affect our health. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirmed an alarming presence of nanoplastics in three popular brands of bottled water.

The study used a technique called stimulated Raman scattering microscopy, which, according to Columbia University's Climate School, is a brand new laser-guided technology that could identify the presence of nanoplastics in bottled water that previously went undetected due to its microscopic size. The study stated that the nanoplastics are way smaller in size compared to microplastics. This allows nanoplastics to pass through the intestines and lungs easily, and they end up entering our bloodstream. Then these nanoplastics spread to other organs of our body like the heart and brain.

Nanoplastics can pose a danger to our bodies by entering individual cells and even crossing through the placenta, entering the bodies of babies in the womb. “Previously this was just a dark area, uncharted. Toxicity studies were just guessing what’s in there,” said Beizhan Yan, the study co-author and environmental chemist at Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This opens a window where we can look into a world that was not exposed to us before.” 

“People developed methods to see nanoparticles but they didn’t know what they were looking at,” revealed Naixin Qian, the study’s lead author. Qian also mentioned that previous studies carried out to detect nanoparticles could only detect them in nano mass, but it was not possible to count individual nanoplastic particles or identify them. The technological advancement was successful in detecting, counting and analyzing the chemical structure of the nanoplastics present in the water. 

The researchers found seven major types of plastics such as polyamide, polypropylene, polyethylene, polymethyl methacrylate, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate. “Microparticles and nanoparticles can bind all kinds of compounds when they come into contact with fluids, thus acting as carriers of all kinds of substances including environmental pollutants, toxins, antibiotics, or microorganisms,” Dr. Sara Benedé from the Spanish National Research Council's Institute of Food Science Research told Medical News Today.

Now, the major question is, how do these nanoplastics end up in bottled water that we previously believed to be safe? “Based on other studies we expected most of the microplastics in bottled water would come from leakage of the plastic bottle itself, which is typically made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic,” Qian told CNN Health. “However, we found there are actually many diverse types of plastics in a bottle of water and that different plastic types have different size distributions. The PET particles were larger, while others were down to 200 nanometers, which is much, much smaller.” Qian further wrote in the study that it is not “totally unexpected to find so much of this stuff,” and “the idea is that the smaller things get, the more of them are there.”