This is especially interesting to me because my mother-in-law is a serious bottled water drinker and Shawna inherited some of those habits. Also, you can get a state of the art water filtration system here if it’s that important to you. Buy some bottles and fill them up at home – with good water rather than some greedy corporation’s poop water….
Bad News About Bottled Water
By Al Sears, MD
If you think paying high prices for bottled water protects your health, I have bad news. Many brands are full of chemicals and bacteria. Common tap water has stricter purity standards and, in many cases, is better for you.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates tap water, but the FDA oversees the bottled water industry. And, by law, the FDA has the power to selectively follow the EPA’s rules – enforcing some and ignoring others. This gives big business the opportunity to sell you expensive bottled water that is anything but safe. And if you think bottled water isn’t a “big business,” think again. Global sales top $35 billion every year.
Here are some of the surprising results from a recent study by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC):
Over 25 percent of bottled water is actually tap water from municipal water supplies.
A popular brand of “spring water” – with a label depicting a lake and mountains – comes from a well in the parking lot of an industrial facility. (The parking lot is right next door to a hazardous waste dump.)
About 30 percent of bottled water has chemical and bacterial contamination above the levels considered safe by state and industry regulations.
In some cases, levels of arsenic in the bottled water tested by the NRDC were at “a level of potential health concern.”
Your best bet for safe, clean drinking water is to put in an under-sink purifier. The reverse-osmosis type is very reliable. If you don’t want to invest the money to do that, a simple pitcher with a charcoal filter is better than most bottled water.
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