Hello Jordan
Recently some physician in my country was talking about how plastic bottles contain high amounts of micro/nanoplastics and even glass bottles are not safe due to their cap releasing high amounts of microplastics and ofcourse at the end promoted his product GNx Pure Water - Giatros Nutrition (water in carton). He cited 2 studies from pubmed done in 2024/2025 1 was observational . To me sounds like fearmongering. What are your thoughts on that?
Howdy,
Yea, I think you and I are on the same page, though I’d be a bit more generous to the study (not the guy) than “fearmongering” and save the skepticism for the sales pitch.
We know that plastic particles are real and basically everywhere, detected in blood, liver, lung, placenta, and breast milk. The bottled-water numbers hold up too: the 2024 PNAS paper found around 240,000 particles per liter, about 90% nanoplastics, and a 2025 review put the range wide depending on brand and method of testing. There’s definitely plastic in the water. No argument.
The observational study is almost certainly Marfella 2024 in NEJM, and it’s an interesting one. Patients with micro and nanoplastics in their excised carotid plaque had more heart attacks, strokes, and deaths over about three years, roughly 20% versus 8%, with a hazard ratio around 4.5. What makes it stand out is that it’s one of the first with a comparator group rather than just “we found plastic in sick people.” But it’s observational, so it can show an association without establishing that plastic caused those events. The authors say as much. They didn’t measure diet, occupation, or socioeconomic status, surgical contamination is a known problem for this kind of sampling, and only 2 of the 11 plastics they screened for showed up at all. It’s interesting, and probably deserves further study…probably.
The problem (to me) is when you zoom out, the practical case gets weaker. Plastic exposure has climbed for decades while cardiovascular death rates have fallen, which is a strange pattern if the exposure were a big driver. And your water bottle is a small slice of total exposure next to food and air anyway. Limiting plastic within reason is fine, the same way air quality is worth caring about, but that’s a long way from needing a specific carton water product.
On that product, a carton isn’t plastic-free. It’s paperboard with a polyethylene lining and a plastic cap, so it doesn’t even deliver on its own premise. Strange times, my friend.
Further reading
Thank you very much for this very well detailed response. I dont know about you Jordan but to me it is very infuriating to see people take advantage of their occupation physician(cardiologist) in this case to make a quick buck by trying to scare people indirectly. Im not even biased towards that guy because he has a great message about health/fitness which falls in line with BBM. He has a large following but nobody really has ever challenged him about some of his bs supplements water in that case along with ecdysterone/test booster.
Heh, yea, I share that sentiment. See Mitchell Hoopers’s recent gaffe on testosterone for another example.
At the end of the day, we’re all human and prone to errors. It still pisses me off when the errors are incentivized by profits (seemingly)…