Empowher Asks:

Do clear plastic water bottle cause cancer?

Dr. Marianne Marchese: So the problem with plastic water bottles is the container itself, not the liquid that’s in it. So when you say plastic water bottles, it actually could be a plastic soda bottle, a plastic juice bottle. It doesn’t matter what liquid’s in, and I just want to be clear that it’s actually the plastic bottle.
And so plastics, if you flip the bottle over, will have a little number on the bottom inside the recycling triangle. There’s a lot of information about the chemical make-up of the bottles based on the number, and people ask me all the time, "Well, I heard number two and four is okay, and number one and seven is bad." And in my opinion, all of the numbers are bad because there’s different chemicals that are harmful to us in all the plastic bottles.
So what I prefer people do, is they drink their liquids out of either a glass bottle or a metal container, and many of the health food stores or the outdoor stores are now selling bottles that are free of some of these chemicals, for example, REI, Recreation Equipment Incorporated, it's an outdoor store, and all of their plastic water bottles are free of BPA, bisphenol A.
An example of a container to drink your water out of would be a metal container such as this one. This metal container, when you open up the top and look inside, the inside is a shiny bright metal. You have to be careful; some metal containers, it’s a dull matted metal, and that means it has a plastic liner on it and metal containers with a plastic liner, that plastic liner has the same chemical bisphenol A in it.
So you want to filter your own water from your home into a metal container that doesn’t have the plastic lining on the inside.