[whatsnew2day.com]
The average water bottle contains 240,000 pieces of carcinogenic nanoplastics, 100 times more than previously thought.

Plastic water bottles contain hundreds of thousands of floating microscopic plastic particles that have caused cancer, new research has found.

The findings are likely to surprise anyone looking for a plastic water bottle to quench their thirst.

Drinking water from a bottle could mean you are contaminating your body with small pieces of plastic, which scientists fear could accumulate in your vital organs with unknown health implications.

Scientists using the most advanced laser scanning techniques found an average of 240,000 plastic particles in a one-litre water bottle, compared to 5.5 per liter of tap water.

Researchers at Columbia University tested three popular brands of bottled water sold in the United States and, using lasers, analyzed the plastic particles they contained down to just 100 nanometers in size.

Drinking water from a bottle could mean you are contaminating your body with small pieces of plastic, which scientists fear could accumulate in your vital organs with unknown health implications.

The particles, nanoplastics, are much smaller than the microplastics previously detected in bottled water.

But nanoplastics are considered potentially toxic because they are so small that they can directly enter blood cells and the brain.

Nanoplastics contain phthalates, chemicals used to make plastics more durable, flexible, and last longer.

Exposure to phthalates is attributed to 100,000 premature deaths in the US each year.

The chemicals are known to interfere with the production of hormones in the body.

According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, they are “linked to developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems.”

The highest estimates found 370,000 nanoplastic particles.

Nanoplastics had been too difficult to detect using conventional techniques, which could only find microplastics from 5 mm to 1 micrometer (one millionth of a meter or 1/25,000th of an inch). Nanoplastic particles are less than 1 micrometer wide.

Groundbreaking research in 2018 found around 300 microplastic particles in a liter of bottled water, but researchers were limited by the measurement techniques they used at the time.

Research is currently being conducted around the world to evaluate the potentially harmful effects of nanoplastics.

Nanoplastics made up 90 percent of these particles and 10 percent were microplastics.