“Drinking from plastic water bottles has been shown to cause serious illness.”
Drinking from plastic water bottles has not been shown to cause any serious illness.
You do not need to give up bottled water out of fear that it will make you seriously ill. If you want less plastic in your day for other reasons, refilling a reusable bottle is an easy swap, but it is a personal choice, not a proven health fix.
Keep drinking water in the form that works for you. If you prefer less plastic, refill a reusable bottle.
No study in people has shown that drinking bottled water causes a serious illness, and the FDA says current evidence does not show that the plastic particles found in food or water are a health risk. Confidence is moderate, not strong, because research on tiny plastic particles in the body is new and still growing.
Drinking from plastic water bottles has not been shown to cause any serious illness. Bottled water does contain tiny bits of plastic, but no study in people has found that drinking it causes a specific disease.
A 2024 lab study using a new imaging method counted about 240,000 tiny plastic pieces per liter (about a quart) of bottled water, on average. About 90% were nanoplastics, pieces far smaller than earlier tests could pick up. Finding particles is not the same as finding harm. The FDA says current evidence does not show that the levels of these particles in food or water are a risk to health. In one study of 257 people who had surgery to clear a neck artery, 20 in 100 of those with plastic in the removed plaque had a heart attack or stroke, or died, over about three years, compared with about 8 in 100 of those without it. The authors say this does not prove cause, and the study measured plastic in the plaque, not where the plastic came from. Scientists are still studying what tiny plastic particles in general do in the body.
- Qian N, Gao X, Lang X, Deng H, Bratu TM, Chen Q, Stapleton P, Yan B, Min W. Rapid single-particle chemical imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2024;121(3):e2300582121. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300582121. PMID: 38190543
- Marfella R, Prattichizzo F, Sardu C, et al. Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events. New England Journal of Medicine. 2024;390(10):900-910. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2309822. PMID: 38446676
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Foods. Content current as of 07/24/2024