Can Freezing Plastic Water Bottles Cause Cancer?

Recently, a lot of people received an email warning that freezing water in plastic water bottles could expose consumers to dioxins, a manmade compound which can cause a variety of health problems, even cancer. The email gave credit to the findings to Johns Hopkins University.

After further research, it was found that the email to be a hoax.

The folks at Johns Hopkins sat down with Dr. Rolf Haden, assistant professor at Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Center for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Haden dispelled the myth saying "This is an urban legend. There are no dioxins in plastics. In addition, freezing actually works against the release of chemicals."

There simply is no scientific basis to support the claim that PET bottles will release dioxin when frozen. Dioxins are a family of chemical compounds that are produced by combustion at extremely high temperatures. They can only be formed at temperatures well above 700 degrees Fahrenheit; they cannot be formed at room temperature or in freezing temperatures. Moreover, there is no reasonable scientific basis for expecting dioxins to be present in plastic food or beverage containers in the first place.

The bottom line is that there is no cancer risk in drinking water from frozen water bottles.

For more info, please refer to the following links:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/medical/a/bottled-water.htm

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/plasticbottles.asp

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/plastic-cancer-link-hoax.html

http://www.plasticsinfo.org/