Dangers and Myths About Plastic Water Bottles

Renegade Water Secrets with Mike Adams, 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 naturalnews.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.