Bottled Water. Is It Clean Drinking Water?

Is our bottled water any better than our drinking water? (And our drinking water is pretty polluted).

If you’re worried about the lack of quality of your drinking water, and you should be, you may be asking yourself “should I be drinking bottled water”? After all, those huge shelves full of lots of different brands of bottled water must suggest that just about everyone is drinking bottled water.

Many are, but that doesn’t mean that bottled water is any better than tap water.

In March 1999 the NRDC (the National Resources Defence Council) released a report into a 4 year study of bottled water.  It was called “Bottled Water. Pure Drink or Pure Hype”? And they were scathing about the  bottled water industry.

The bottom line of the report, which you can read in the link above, is that there is no reason why bottled water is any purer or cleaner than tap water. It just sold so well because it was advertised so heavily as being cleaner and purer and safer than tap water.

Over 1000 bottles of 103 different brands of bottled water were tested. Over a third of those tested were contaminated including synthetic chemicals, arsenic and bacteria, and one exceeded allowable state contamination limits.

The reason is that the FDA doesn’t have stict regulations about the quality of bottled water, so basically anything can be in there and the FDA won’t do very much.

Bottled water is a huge industry, and turns over $billions. There are some very big companies involved in the bottled water industry, including Coca Cola, a company not known for it’s concern towards the health of it’s customers.

So if you’re worried about the safety of your tap water, be concerned. But don’t drink bottled water. Find the best drinking water filter you can buy, and use it.

Because nothing much has changed. Read the rest of this entry

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