The Great Bottled Water Debate
An efficient and cost-effective way of providing yourself and your family with healthy water is the filtration of tap water. There are many types of systems to accomplish this. Common methods of filtering can remove the chemicals, but also removes healthy components that nature intended in our water. This will be the context of our next Healthy By Choice class.
“I know she ate a worm but we are not here to debate the de bait Deb ate.”
The Bottled Water Debate?
The global bottled water market is rapidly increasing with approximately 600 million households consuming bottled water in 2018. That's more than 100 billion gallons (391 billion liters) of water per year or 1 million bottles per minute.
For the last few years, bottled water sales in the U.S have surpassed soda sales. This is good news as many people are looking for healthier beverage options. Currently, bottled water consumption in the U.S. is nearly 50 gallons per year per person.
Most of the people I talk with that prefer bottled water vs tap water do so for three main reasons. They assume bottled water is healthier than tap water, they prefer the taste of bottled water vs tap water and many like the convenience of bottled water.
Bottled water has been called the biggest marketing gimmick of all time. At 2000 times the cost of tap water we would expect it to be healthier and taste better than tap water, but does it live up to the hype?
Is Bottled Water Healthier than Tap Water?
Contrary to the image of purity advertised by the bottled water industry, bottled water may contain a lot more than simple H2O. In 2008, testing commissioned by Environmental Working Group (EWG), found 38 pollutants in 10 brands of bottled water, including disinfection byproducts, industrial chemicals, radioactivity, and bacteria. The Natural Resources Defense Council conducted a four-year review of the bottled-water industry and its safety standards, NRDC concluded that there is no assurance that bottled water is cleaner or safer than tap. In fact, an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is tap water — meaning that they were chemically indistinguishable from what comes from the faucet. They tested 103 bottled waters and detected potentially harmful contaminants, including microbes and regulated chemicals in about 50% of the samples tested.
Many recent reports have looked at microplastics in bottled water. It has been estimated that one bottle of water can contain up to hundreds of tiny plastic particles that we're drinking down with bottled H2O. One author estimates that the amount of plastic consumed per week is could be as high 5 grams which are the equivalent weight of a credit card.
Another major concern regarding bottled water is the ingesting of endocrine disruptors such as bisphenol A (BPA). Low dose exposure to BPA has been linked to many health problems including obesity infertility, early onset of puberty, hormone-dependent cancers such as prostate and breast cancer, lower testosterone levels and sperm production and heart disease.
Bottled Water Tastes and Smells Better than Tap Water.
Many people prefer not to drink municipally treated tap water. Often, this is for aesthetic reasons. They don’t like the way tap water tastes or smells. One good aspect of tap water is that it is monitored and treated to kill pathogenic micro-organisms. This is usually accomplished with chlorine treatment or other types of similar halogens. The treatment of municipally treated water with these compounds can, but not always, results in an unpleasant taste and smell.
Many blind taste tests have shown that many times people prefer the taste of tap water over bottled water or cannot distinguish the difference between the two. ABC’s Good Morning America conducted a blind water taste test with the following results as to the be best tasting water.
12 percent Evian
19 percent O-2
24 percent Poland Spring
45 percent New York City tap water
Yorkshire Water, the water department in Yorkshire, England, found that 60 percent of 2,800 people surveyed could not tell the difference between the local tap water and UK bottled water.
The hosts of Showtime’s television series Penn & Teller: Bullshit conducted a blind taste test comparing waters. The test showed that 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred city tap water to bottled waters. The hosts of the show conducted another test in a trendy Southern California restaurant. A water sommelier handed out water menus with extravagant prices to the patrons. The patrons had no idea that all of the fancy bottles of water were filled with the same water from a water hose in the back of the restaurant.
Patrons were willing to pay $7 a bottle for “L’eau du Robinet” (French for “tap water”), “Agua de Culo” (Spanish for “ass water”), and “Amazone” (“filtered through the Brazilian rainforest’s natural filtration system”). The fancy bottles and exotic names were enough to convince the taste buds that they were experiencing pure bliss.
So then, why might bottled water taste better? It’s because we expect it to taste better. I other words, it is very effective marketing.
Convenience
The other reason people tell me that they choose bottled water is that it is convenient. My response to that is, don’t we all too often trade convenience at the expense of our health? We do.
Although it is convenient to purchase bottled water, it is not convenient for our Planet.
Single-use water bottles are wreaking havoc on the environment.
There are over 100 million plastic bottles used each day globally and nearly 80% of these end up in our landfills. Approximately 1500 bottles end up in landfills and the ocean every second. Globally, people go through roughly 200 billion plastic water bottles annually.
Most single-use bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (“PET”), a plastic produced from the byproducts of the oil industry. The manufacturing, bottling, transporting, and refrigerating of bottled water uses an estimated 32-54 million barrels of oil annually in the US, with 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. Also, approximately 3 liters of water are used to produce 1 liter of bottled water, meaning millions of liters of the valuable liquid are squandered during the process. Given these figures, bottled water requires 2,000 times more energy to produce than tap water and at a hefty cost to our planet.
To make matters much worse, out of the 35 billion single-use bottles used every year in the US, less than 30 percent is recycled. For this reason, approximately 20 billion single-use plastic bottles end up in our landfills and bodies of water each year. Since plastic bottles take up to 450 years to biodegrade, the planet could soon be drowning in a sea of plastic. By 2050, plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish, predicts a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum.
Our Self Care bottom line, Say No to Bottled Water. Make choices that are healthy for Ourselves, our Planet and our Wallets.
Drinking plenty of water is good for your health, but both tap and bottled water can contain contaminants that may be harmful. An efficient and cost-effective way of providing yourself and your family with healthy water is the filtration of tap water. There are many types of systems to accomplish this. Common methods of filtering can remove the chemicals, but also removes healthy components that nature intended in our water.
Healthy by Choice
Bottled Water vs Tap Water: Blind Taste Test Edition
For today’s The Impetus let’s examine if bottled water really tastes better than tap water. Given that this is an individual choice or preference, let’s look at blind taste tests that have been conducted by many organizations and in many different geographical locations.
“Water is the driving force of all nature. ”
Water Choices
One of the most important aspects of the Wellness Home is to provide ourselves and our families with clean, healthy water.
Water is not just a beverage choice, it is an essential nutrient. We have been saying this for years and the reason why is we tend to choose just about everything else to drink other than water. That is the main reason why over 75% of us walk around dehydrated every day. In a recent article in the Epoch Times, Gina Bria states, “Dehydration is the mother of all epidemics and is the first step we need to take in addressing chronic disease.”
“Dehydration is the mother of all epidemics and is the first step we need to take in addressing chronic disease.”
We have choices for different types of drinking water: tap water, filtered water and bottled water.
Many people, nearly 75% of us drink bottled water. Over 25% drink only bottled water. It has puzzled me for years why people would pay more than 2000 times the cost of bottled water than tap water. Consider that 4,787 bottled waters could be filled with tap water for $2.10 and every time you buy a bottle of water for $1, you are paying 2,279 times what you would if you filled that same bottle with tap water. Spending $1 on a bottle of water every now and then isn’t that big a deal, but when you make a regular habit of it, it really adds up. If you buy just one $1 bottle of water each day, your annual spending on bottled water comes to $365. Getting the same amount of water from your tap would cost you less than $0.10.
When I ask someone the question, why do you drink bottled water? The three common responses are:
1. Bottled water is healthier than tap water.
2. Bottled water is convenient.
3. Bottled water tastes better than tap water, (the most common).
For today’s The Impetus let’s examine if bottled water really tastes better than tap water. Given that this is an individual choice or preference, let’s look at blind taste tests that have been conducted by many organizations and in many different geographical locations.
Bottle Water Versus Tap Water Taste
In a blind water taste test by Good Morning America, New York City tap water came out the clear favorite among testers:
New York City Tap: received 45% of the vote
Poland Spring: received 24% of the vote
O-2, Oxygenated Water: received 19% of the vote
Evian: received 12% of the vote
And this test was no fluke. Time after time, tap water is rated as good or better tasting than bottled water blind taste tests. You can see similar results in numerous cities, both in the U.S. and abroad:
In 2011, Boston University conducted a blind taste test to compare tap water with Vermont Pure bottled water, the brand used in the student lounge’s water cooler. Dozens of students sampled both waters and were asked to determine which was which. Of the 67 testers, only one-third of the respondents correctly identified the tap water sample. Another one-third thought it was the bottled water, and the rest said they couldn’t tell the difference.
Washington, D.C. The Center for Nutrition, Diet and Health at the University of the District of Columbia conducted a blind taste test with 218 participants, most of whom said they preferred to drink bottled water at home. Testers tried samples of four waters – tap water, spring water, distilled water, and mineral water – and ranked them in order of preference. Tap water wasn’t the top pick, but it came in a close second, with 30% of the vote.
Cleveland. ABC’s NewsChannel5 Cleveland invited residents to try samples of three waters: Sam’s Choice Purified bottled water from Walmart, Aquafina bottled water, and Cleveland tap water. Once again, tap water wasn’t the favorite, but it came in a close second to Aquafina. Both samples were preferred by more than two to one over the Sam’s Choice water – which most people guessed was tap water.
San Francisco. In 2009, testers at Mother Jones magazine compared samples of their local San Francisco tap water – both filtered and unfiltered – with samples of eight different bottled waters. The unfiltered tap water came in third, beating out expensive brands such as Voss, Evian, and Fiji Water.
Belfast, Ireland. In a BBC News story, pedestrians sampled three different waters. The first, “harvested from icebergs in the Canadian Arctic,” sells for more than 26 pounds, about $40 per bottle; the second, made from the sap of maple trees, costs the equivalent of $24; and the third came from the tap. Most tasters couldn’t correctly identify the expensive waters from tap water, and one described the $40 sample as “horrible.”
Let’s face it, many people prefer bottled water as a result of excellent marketing by bottled water companies. This was hilariously exemplified a few years ago by popular magicians, Penn and Teller. This YouTube clip shows an elaborate con in a “very trendy Southern California restaurant,” where they created a phony “water list” of six different imported bottled waters selling for as much as $7 per bottle. All six bottles, from “Mount Fuji” to “L’eau Du Robinet,” which is French for “tap water” were filled with a garden hose on the patio. Restaurant patrons claimed to be able to taste distinct differences among the various brands, and consistently agreed that they were much better than tap water, which is exactly what they all were. Consumers think it tastes great as long as it’s served in a fancy bottle and with a fancy price.
Bottled Water Vs. Tap Water Conclusion
Tap water tastes as good, it’s as pure, it’s better for the environment, and costs under 1/2,000th as much. In my opinion, it’s justifiably nuts to pay for and drink bottled water, unless you have no other choice.
The solution to our global water issues and the plastic pollution of our planet is very complex and people often wonder what they can do as individuals to make a positive impact. One thing we all can do is to not to contribute to landfills by filtering tap water rather than purchasing bottled water. In recent blogs we have talked about the pollution problem with bottled water and about how to choose a water filtration system.
Filtering our tap water is convenient, cost effective and the best way to provide ourselves and our families with healthy water. Our personal choice for water filtration is the Nikken Waterfall. Imagine if we could create fresh spring water in our own home or office? This is the strategy behind the Nikken Waterfall.
Water Matters and is a vital component of every Wellness Home.
Be Healthy by Choice, not by Chance.