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Bottled water

Stampyhead said:
Sure, chlorine is great for killing bacteria in the water before you drink it, but the problem is that our intestines are full of good bacteria that help to digest our food. When we drink chlorinated water the chlorine can't tell the difference between the good bacteria and the bad. Studies have linked the consumption of chlorinated water to some types of cancer.
So if you have to drink tap water, at least run it through a filter first.
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One think you need to rememeber is by the time it gets to you the it at such low levals that it does not really do any damage. What makes chlorine so good is how it works. First it will kill everything in it and then it has a residue effect. It more or less just prevents new growth does not really kill and it keeps dropping in level over time. Sorry I do not have access to the data on it plus my understanding of the finer points is pretty bad.

Also do not forget any increase in deaths cause by it in by far is over shadows by the number of lives it saves. Problem is people read these studies and do not see the other little details in them on the finer points.

THe general public is pretty stupid when it comes to things like this and go screaming at the headlines. All the bottle water you drink has chlorine in it. Other wise it would not stay safe to drink during transport. Plus it going to chlorinated when they bottle it anyway and treat it.

The other systems out there while good at killing stuff the draw back comes as they have no residue effect and they cost a heck of a lot more to run.
 
floriflee said:
I'm with you. I dislike the AquaFina and Dasani stuff, and much prefer Fiji and Evian. We have a Britta so we don't buy much bottled water, though.
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I have a Brita pitcher and keep it in the refrigerator all the time for nice, ice cold water in the summer and to refill the hot water airpot I have. :)
 
Haha, I guess if you were stranded in the wilderness, youd have to find something else to drink besides water!
 
The only time I will buy bottled water is if I'm away from home and need a drink and don't want to buy carbonated drinks.

Personally I can't taste any difference between any of the bottled waters, so I usually buy based on price.

I tend to buy a bottle of water at the start of the week, then keep refilling it from the tap in work. At home I use a Brita jug, but mainly as a way of easily storing 3 litres of water near my computer rather than running downstairs to the tap all the time.

I think there definitely is a 'snobbiness' surrounding bottled water and more people need to realise that what comes out of their tap is totally safe and just as good for you as bottled water. It's a known fact that while tap water is subject to very strict quality controls, there are no such requirements for bottled water.
 
I quite like my bottled water (sad, as it's not good for the environment), but I refuse to drink anything made by Coke or Pepsi (which is about 60% of the bottled water range you see in the shops).

Coke tried to launch Danasi here in the UK, and got knocked back when people discovered it was just filtered tap water from the local water mains, and then, even worse, discovered that it was contaminated to illegal levels with carcinogenic chemicals.

So basically they took tap water, made it worse, then sold it at inflated prices. I know that some US regulations (not all) are more lax than europe, so possibly they're still selling the same water, made with the same process to you in the USA. :eek::eek:

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,3604,1174127,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3550063.stm


When I'm out of the house, I usually drink Evian or Volvic, as they're reasonably local. There are some UK bottled waters, but they're more expensive, or don't come in the right size bottles.

At home, I used to drink bottled water, but I discovered how to drastically improve London's tap water:

1. Take a nice-looking glass bottle or pitcher (must be decent glass, not plastic),

2. Fill it up. (if it's a bottle, don't fill it past the shoulder of the bottle, you need some water/air surface area).

3. Don't seal it. Leave it open with the top off. (I prefer a bottle as the narrow opening gives less room for dust to fall in.)

4. Stick it in the fridge overnight.

5. Pour it into a cup and drink.

Much of the chlorine and other stuff evaporates, and you get a nice glass bottle of lovely drinkable water. This is the method used by water companies when they enter their water for blind taste competions (and beat lots of bottled waters).

Leaving it open helps avoid it going stale, and not drinking directly from the bottle (important) avoids getting mouth bacteria on the neck, which creates a manky smell after a few days.

You can top it up after using, but still a good idea to rinse it out and let dry every couple of weeks or so.

I find London tap water difficult to drink, but after this method, it's fine.

Cornwall tap water (where my step-mum lives) is lovely to drink :) The best water I ever had was from someone's well in their garden, out in rural Cornwall - drew it up myself, and it tasted like liquid wine - couldn't stop drinking it!
 
RedTomato in case you want to know what is happening to your water when you expose it to air like that is mostly it is carbonic acid starts forming in the water. It makes a little more acidic.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
RedTomato in case you want to know what is happening to your water when you expose it to air like that is mostly it is carbonic acid starts forming in the water. It makes a little more acidic.
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I don't know much chemistry, but you seem to be saying that atmospheric carbon dioxide is entering the water. If true, I don't think it makes much difference to anything. For me, the greatest difference is less chlorine taste/smell.

Some people here say the chlorine in tap water is long gone before you drink it. That's definitely not true here in London.
 
faucet filter + nalgene bottle = happy, happy me :)

i refuse to buy bottled water...it's just such a silly waste of resources and money, IMHO.
 
My mom will boil water and let it cool in glass jars before pouring it into serving pitchers. An old habit from her growing-up years in Indonesia, China, etc. where you do not drink the tap water. She continues to do so to this day. I can't be bothered, so I use a Brita filter.

Partly due to my mother's influences, I enjoy my water at almost any temperature. Most of my friends (and presumably most of you) think drinking room-temperature water (especially tap water!) is disgusting. I have no problem with it. (My mother's serving pitchers were always kept on the counter at room temperature, and in fact were frequently a bit warmer if the water was just boiled and still cooling down). In fact when my stomach is upset or I'm feeling cold I will occasionally nuke a cup of water and drink it lukewarm to hot. Think of it as a very weak tea. :)

I actually dislike iced water because my teeth have become cold sensitive and it slows me down.
 
rockthecasbah said:
Last year alone Americans spent $15 billion on bottled water.
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Before bottle water we had soda in the can or bottle. Now days it seems many drink bottled water instead of soda.

I am wondering the correlation of the increase sales of bottle water to the decreased sales of soda. My guess is that the bottle water market is growing much faster than the decline of the soda market.

Anybody have data on this?
 
Do the people that spend money on bottled water when they can get perfectly good water from a tap also go to those places where you pay just to go and breathe the air ? It's kind of the same thing IMHO

Edit: Oxygen Bars !! That's what i was thinking of !
 
If you have good tap-water available, bottled water is the apex of idiocy. And that disease is spreading here as well. The tap-water in Finland is generally speaking few orders of magnitude better quality than bottled water is, yet some morons buy bottled water.

Seriously: instead of drinking that hi-quality tap-water, the water gets bottled in to plastic bottles, shipped thousands of kilometers, put on store-shelves and sold to some idiots at about 1000 markup when compared to tap-water. Hello-o?!?!? Think of all the money you could save. Think of the environment. But no.
 
I have a Camelbak bottle that I refill each day at work with my $0.58 gallon jug of spring water (verified spring source, pleasant mineral profile, carbon-filtered, ozonated, and UV-treated). But if I like to be fancy, the only two premium waters I'd go for would be Smart Water (cleanest mineral profile taste ever!) or Fiji water (silica makes for the best mouth feel/"texture" I've ever found.. I could drink gallons EASILY). But yeah, both of those are outside the layman's pricerange so I just get my embarrassing gallons and drink them at my desk. :)

I usually drink non-water stuff before and after work (between milk, green tea, nitric oxide shakes, protein shakes, and the occasional soft drink or juice)... a good amount actually, so I'd be about as hydrated as the average person without the gallon of water at work, but I do best with it. Bodybuilders my size average at least that amount, but I'm paranoid of overhydration.
 
it5five said:
Bottled water = dumb. <snip>

Not to mention the extremely large amount of plastic that is wasted with all of these bottles. Almost nobody recycles them, so they sit in landfills forever.
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I totally agree- I took a roadtrip round western USA last year, and being from the UK we drank only bottled water while on the road, incase the local water did not agree with us (Had problems with tap water in Florida previously), and by the end we had collected hundreds of bottles. All along the way we were stopping in supermarkets asking where we could recycle the bottles, and we couldn't find any!

We ended up taking them back to Vancouver, BC :rolleyes:
 
I personally drink filtered tap water most of the time, but when I get thirsty at work I buy a Dasani and then refill it from the water fountain for a week or so until the bottle starts to get beat up. If I didn't buy the water it would be a pop so the energy costs are about the same and the water is healthier.
 
At home I only drink tap water, without filtering it at all. I like my water hard.
The only times it is not stupid to buy bottled water is if you need a drink and you are out and about, or when you are in an area where it is unsafe to drink the tap water.
 
shinji said:
Fiji water, dannon or hy-drive (caffeinated)
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Dannon is in the water market?? Is that in the US? Here in France Dannon (properly spelled 'Danone' when they're not trying to keep freedom-fry-eating Americans from knowing they're eating French yogurt) is one of France's largest multinationals, and has to my knowledge stayed out of the bottled water game, which is highly competitive here. Many French people are quite picky about their water: it's never iced, rarely chilled and they make a distinct difference between bottled water that comes from a real spring and bottled water Dasani-style (i.e. regular treated water made worse and sold for more). Of course, many many many French also drink (very tasty) tapwater, so maybe that's why so many French water companies started exporting. I'm usually a tap-drinker myself, but after a couple of years here I can taste the difference between several bottled brands, no problem. The best spring water I've ever had was in Eastern Europe: Croatia, Slovenia and Poland to be specific. And yes, we were in places where the tapwater was more than questionable:).

The best tapwater I had access to in the US was in Portland, Or. No need for treatment of any kind, at least if you've got good plumbing. When I moved to Pittsburgh from there the drop in quality was notable.

While we're here, anyone wanna talk about bubbly spring water? There's this crazy medical 'fact' my wife used on me recently that states San Pellegrino is the only bubbly water that won't contribute to cellulite :cool:. Something about an added ingredient in most of the other brands...any medical types out there have an opinion about this? Sounds loony to me, but she claims her doctor told her...
 
The historians of the future will be able to date the moment when western civilization collapsed into decadent self-indulgence: when people with more money than sense bought water in bottles...
 
Doylem said:
The historians of the future will be able to date the moment when western civilization collapsed into decadent self-indulgence: when people with more money than sense bought water in bottles...
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And started to question their mental state when then went silly and started buying bottles of freeze dried spring water for $1.99 ;)
The U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution on the importance of municipal water at its June meeting, citing among other things, that:

• Plastic water bottles are one of the fastest growing sources of municipal waste; most aren't recycled

• In the U.S., the plastic produced for water bottles requires 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, enough to fuel 100,000 cars or power 250,000 homes for a year;

• More than a quarter of the bottled water produced (including Coca Cola's Dasani and Pepsico's Aquafina) comes from municipal tap water;

• Bottled water costs 1,000 to 10,000 times more than tap water;

• Water from U.S. municipal water systems must meet more stringent and much more frequently-monitored health standards than those for bottled water.
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