That bottle you’re reusing over and over has been compared to a toilet seat..
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If it’s not washed daily, your water bottle could be harbouring as many germs as a toilet seat.
The team at Treadmill Review conducted research into this matter, swabbing the lids of 12 reusable water bottles used by athletes and sent their findings off for lab analysis.
Skin-crawling. The team found the reusable bottles may be hosting a HUGE number of bacterial cells, “more than 300,000 colony-forming units per square centimeter (CFU/sq cm)”.
And choose a stainless steel bottle, which is less of a magnet for bacteria than the plastic variety.
In layman’s terms this means, ” drinking from the average refillable bottle can be many times worse than licking your dog’s toy”.
Our germ-ridden bottles are caused by a lack of washing (loads of us go days without properly washing out our bottles, assuming that putting water in there must keep them clean), sweat, and all the daily germs you encounter on a daily basis.
A far better picture emerged from tests on straw-top bottles, which were found to contain a fraction of the bacteria of other bottles – just 25 CFU/sq cm.
And just to make this news scarier?
This is rather alarming when you consider that 60% of the germs found by researchers in this study can make a person sick.
According to Metro UK, the reason why water bottles get so nasty is that people simply don’t wash them enough. It’s still very important to drink loads of water, and reusable bottles are the environmentally friendly choice.
However, buying a new bottle every time you need a drunk of water is not only wasteful, but also adds up, money-wise. Squeeze top and screw-top bottles weren’t as bad, with around 160,000 CFU per square cm. “Additionally, water bottles without crevices and tough-to-clean spots are less likely to host germs”.
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While most of the bottles tested came in at a much lower 313, 499 CFU per square cm, that’s still a lot of germs to be putting in your mouth.
