Freezing Bottled Water this Summer
As the weather is getting warmer, I started thinking about freezing some of our bottled water to put in my daughter’s school lunch. If it’s a block of ice in the morning, it can sit in the hot sun for 4 hours and end up nice, slushy, ice-cold water by noon. But I remembered a couple of moms last summer saying that freezing bottled water was unsafe: something about the plastic breaking down and leaking chemical “dioxins” into the water. Their concern, I believe, was set off by e-mail warnings about plastics. Everyone was forwarding scares about microwaving plastic, re-using bottles, freezing or letting water bottles get hot in the car, and some of the scares falsely cited Johns Hopkins. I did some research and found this interview with Rolf Halden from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Center for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In the interview, Halden says freezing bottled water is perfectly safe. Plastics don’t contain dioxins; and, even if they did, freezing slows down chemical reactions. This guy is a real expert with lots of good info. Check out the article.
It seems like there is a lot of anxiety right now about what we (and especially our children) ingest. Lots of concern about things givin’ ya cancer. I want to be aware and protect my child’s health, of course, but I don’t like getting scared for no reason. There are enough real things to worry about as a mom. I’m learning not to trust every health alert e-mail that is forwarded to me (even from friends.) Getting information from the source, I’m finding, is very helpful and re-assuring. Also, I’ve started using snopes.com, an urban legend fact-checking site, to separate fact from fiction.
Now I can get back to worrying about nutrition, traffic safety, classroom behavior and self-esteem–yay!
Have fun freezing drinks this summer!
Julie Said,
May 29, 2009 @ 10:53 pm
Yay. Great first post.
catgirl Said,
June 1, 2009 @ 2:17 pm
If you buy single-use bottles of water, I would recommend buying a re-usable bottle. If you use a thermos, it will keep the water cold without freezing it, you’ll save money in the long term, it will reduce waste, and it will teach your daughter responsibility to keep track of it. I know that freezing bottled water isn’t dangerous to your health, but are other reasons why a re-usable thermos is preferable.