Does plastic contaminate beverages?

[Eulogy]

I heard claims from another message board that when drinks like soda are stored in plastic bottles, the plastic seeps into the beverage and poisons it. Is this true?

[Darth Wong]

I heard claims from another message board that when drinks like soda are stored in plastic bottles, the plastic seeps into the beverage and poisons it. Is this true?

Look up "bisphenol-A". There are certain chemicals which can leech into the water under certain conditions, although there is heated debate about their safety.

[Jaepheth]

Poisonous or not aside, I personally think beverages drunk from glass bottles and cups just taste better than drinks in plastic, aluminum, steel, or even Styrofoam containers. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the glass being colder, or maybe it's all in my head.

[Darth Wong]

Poisonous or not aside, I personally think beverages drunk from glass bottles and cups just taste better than drinks in plastic, aluminum, steel, or even Styrofoam containers. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the glass being colder, or maybe it's all in my head.

It's because your mouth touches the bottle, so the material in the bottle influences your sensation of taste. You would probably fail a double-blind test if you were drinking from those bottles out of a straw, thus taking direct mouth-to-bottle contact out of the equation.

[Sikon]

I heard claims from another message board that when drinks like soda are stored in plastic bottles, the plastic seeps into the beverage and poisons it. Is this true?

While plastics are primarily insoluble anyway, any health effects from any trace compounds getting into the water, if existent at all, are at least too small to have been proven to be of any substantial public health hazard in past studies. After all, they would not be on the list of compounds permitted by the FDA for food and beverage containers otherwise. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.

For example, technically one gets exposed to a tiny amount of extra carcinogens just by the smoke of having a barbeque, but that's too trivial to base one's lifestyle around avoiding barbeques.

If you spent extra money and time to drink out of metal or glass containers instead of plastics only, you would be spending resources which might be better spent instead on a smoke detector, radon testing your home, keeping a cell phone around for emergencies, going in for appropriate immunizations, or any of various other more conventional health and safety measures with concrete benefit.

The main thing to watch out for is if there is actual evidence of a quantitatively major effect. Here's an example of how much different evidence that can mean, in contrast:

In a major ongoing study involving 3,734 elderly Japanese-American men, those who ate the most tofu during midlife had up to 2.4 times the risk of later developing Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the three-decade long Honolulu-Asia Aging Study, 27 foods and drinks were correlated with participants’ health. Men who consumed tofu at least twice weekly had more cognitive impairment than those who rarely or never ate the soybean curd.1, 2

"The test results were about equivalent to what they would have been if they were five years older," said lead researcher Dr. Lon R. White from the Hawaii Center for Health Research. For the guys who ate no tofu, however, they tested as though they were five years younger.

What’s more, higher midlife tofu consumption was also associated with low brain weight. Brain atrophy was assessed in 574 men using MRI results and in 290 men using autopsy information. Shrinkage occurs naturally with age, but for the men who had consumed more tofu, White said "their brains seemed to be showing an exaggeration of the usual patterns we see in aging." [...]

Plants such as soy are making oral contraceptives to defend themselves, says Claude Hughes, Ph.D., a neuroendocrinologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. They evolved compounds that mimic natural estrogen. These phytoestrogens can interfere with the mammalian hormones involved in reproduction and growth--a strategy to reduce the number and size of predators. [...]

One link to the puzzle may involve calcium-binding proteins, which are associated with protection against neurodegenerative diseases. In recent animal studies at Brigham Young University’s Neuroscience Center, researchers found that consumption of phytoestrogens via a soy diet for a relatively short interval can significantly elevate phytoestrogen levels in the brain and decrease brain calcium-binding proteins.4 [...]

A study reported in The Lancet found that the "daily exposure of infants to isoflavones in soy infant-formulas is 6-11 fold higher on a bodyweight basis than the dose that has hormonal effects in adults consuming soy foods." (This dose, equivalent to two glasses of soy milk per day, was enough to change menstrual patterns in women.6 In the blood of infants tested, concentrations of isoflavones were 13,000-22,000 times higher than natural estrogen concentrations in early life.7 ) [...]

From here.

In the above example, the difference was those with high weekly tofu intake having lesser cognitive performance like their brains being 5 years older. Such was an observation further supported by the MRI scans of brain shrinkage, which ordinarily occurs with aging but was accelerated. That's a real quantitative result suggesting apparently actually major effect. Of course, soy is also known for health benefits against cardiovascular disease and more, but it wouldn't be surprising for it to have a complicated mixture of positive and negative effects on a system as complex as the human body.

Even then, though, dosage matters a lot. Even having read about another study several years ago reaching a similar conclusion on the effect of high tofu intake, I don't waste my time or money trying to avoid all soybean intake. I still don't hesitate to have soy sauce sometimes, especially since the dosage of the compounds of concern would presumably be small compared to that of the tofu-eaters in the study.

Besides, some soybean products like soybean oil are in countless other foods anyway, although such is not necessarily a problem if with limited amounts of the relevant substances compared to eating tofu twice a week.

In the case of plastic drink bottles, I've never heard of a study showing a quantitative, substantial health result for the average person drinking from such, nothing analogous to the 5-year extra brain aging equivalent of the heavy tofu-eaters, so the evidence suggests it should be a lesser concern.

[andrewgpaul]

One thing to take into account is that perhaps drinks in plastic bottles are made at different plants to those in glass ot cans.

For instance, I have heard that the Irn-Bru sold in plastic 500ml bottles is made in Manchester, unlike the stuff in glass bottles and cans, made in Scotland. If true, this might explain the percieved difference in taste. If not, I'm another victim of the effects Mike mentioned.

[Sarevok]

What about soft drinks cans ? Is there a chance some of that metal might get dissolved into the drink ?

[Junghalli]

What about soft drinks cans ? Is there a chance some of that metal might get dissolved into the drink ?

I think soft drink cans are usually aluminum, which is pretty resistant to corrosion because it forms a hard thin film of rust instead of fragile puffy flakes like iron. I dunno, you might be drinking a little aluminum oxide (the material saphires and rubies are made out of, incidentally), but I doubt it'd be in significant amounts.

[Eulogy]

So bottled soda and bagged milk at the store is safe to drink then. That's very good to know.

[Sea Skimmer]

One main issue I’ve heard about was is people leave plastic containers, especially very cheap bottled water containers, out in the sun in cars to get baked at as much as 140 degrees. That makes a lot more of the chemical leech into the water then would occur at normal temperatures.

[Broomstick]

Personally, I'd worry more about what's in the water in the beverage than what's in the bottle itself - think about melamine in Chinese milk, or some of the crap found in bottled water recently at Sam's Club.

[Enigma]

Well, the Canadian government is going to ban Bisphenol-A in baby bottles and are planning to take further actions to limit that chemical.

Bisphenol-A baby bottles to be banned.

[BountyHunterSAx]

On a mostly-related subject - does microwaving plastic containers cause health risks? Particularly if there's no visible sign of any deterioration to the plastic container.

-AHMAD

[Gil Hamilton]

I heard claims from another message board that when drinks like soda are stored in plastic bottles, the plastic seeps into the beverage and poisons it. Is this true?

I think the question is, which plastic? Most drink bottles are made of PET, which is excellent at not absorbing solvents and also non-toxic, according to an MSDS I pulled up for the polymer itself. The bisphenol-A stuff was nasty, but you shouldn't worry too much about most plastic containers.

It should be noted that there is a trick you can do to actually decontaminate bad drinking water using PET bottles. You fill the contaminated water in the bottles, put them out in direct sunlight for a minimum of six hours, and that cooked all the nasties in the water, rendering it safe to drink. This would be a funny technique to do is the plastic bottle gradually made water inside it toxic.

On a mostly-related subject - does microwaving plastic containers cause health risks? Particularly if there's no visible sign of any deterioration to the plastic container.

The biggest problem with microwaving plastics is that many thermoplastic containers have really low melting points (which is necessary for their production), so alot of them will melt and start to break down in the microwave. If they are designed with a high enough melting point (and alot of containers will tell you if they are microwave safe) then they could be absolutely fine.

And when I googled it to make sure, Snopes gave me http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cookplastic.asp so take that as you will.

[Singular Intellect]

When people begin to worry about smaller and smaller impacts of any particular substance, it gets to the point of ridiculas.

Quite frankly, even oxygen and water are harmful since they literally 'rust' your cells and contribute to the aging process.

I can't speak for anyone else obviously, but when the impact of any particular activity (especially if obviously done too much) affects your life span or health by a mere couple of years, I'm not exactly going to worry about it. The stress and effort of trying to 'correct' the issue would probably contribute more to negative side affects than the issue trying to be avoided.

[Executor32]

I know anecdotal evidence isn't worth much, but I never get large drinks from McDonald's (except sweet tea, but that comes in a Styrofoam cup) because once I get to the last few ounces of soda it starts to taste strongly of plastic.

[andrewgpaul]

Do McDonalds' drinks in the US come in plastic cups? How odd; the ones in the UK are paper.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Wax paper cups for McDonalds here in aus.

[Gil Hamilton]

Do McDonalds' drinks in the US come in plastic cups? How odd; the ones in the UK are paper.

Not the McDonald's I've been too, which either use paper coated with wax cups for smaller sizes and thermoplastic cups for larger sizes (probably PET... hrm... I could probably dice one up and feed it to the Raman in the lab and find out). You get styrene cups for coffee, but not for pop.

[Pu-239]

I was under the impression BPA leaching was only relevant to polycarbonate plastics such as Nalgene bottles?