Robert Tell is a health and nutrition researcher currently specializing in drinking water purity and home water filtration systems. Check his website: http://www.filtered-safe-water.com/
Bottled water vs tap water is a strange comparison, once you learn something about it.
We’ re spending billions of dollars on bottled water, in the hope that this will be purer, better tasting and better for our health than tap water.
As it turns out, this is almost entirely wasted money.
Turns out, the winner of the tap vs bottled water battle is:
Neither!
The reasons are pretty simple. Simplest of all, a lot of bottled water turns out to be actually nothing but bottled tap water. You read that right: about 40 percent -- nearly half -- of bottled water is bottled right from the tap.
Then there’s the rest of bottled water, which is pretty poor, too. For a start, almost all bottled water comes in plastic bottles, which has many down sides:
1. The plastic can leach chemicals into the water.
2. The cost of bottled water is ridiculous, often pushing $10 a gallon and sometimes higher, compared to a penny a gallon or so for the tap water much bottled water comes from.
3. If you pay extra for bottles made of polycarbonate (once thought to be the perfect plastic bottle material), the bottle leaches a particularly nasty chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. This is a chemical found in polycarbonate bottles that may be toxic even at very low levels, according to a recent draft report from the National Toxicology Program.
4. The quality of the water inside those bottles is usually unknown, since neither the US Food and Drug Administration nor any other public agency has strict requirements for bottled water. In fact, for the number of inspection requirements, tap water is the big winner in the tap vs bottled water comparison.
5. Plastic is a petroleum product. It takes many million barrels of crude oil every year to manufacture all those plastic bottles -- enough to fuel thousands of cars for the full year.
6. A solid 80 percent of plastic bottles end up in landfills, adding to the growing garbage problem -- and leaching chemicals into the soil for a century or more.
So, are you better off just drinking tap water?
That’s an issue, too. After all, it was the many reports of toxic chemicals and prescription drugs in drinking water that pushed bottled water into popularity in the first place.
So you see why bottled water vs tap water is no contest at all, really.
Fortunately, there is a reasonable answer: the home water filter. In fact, a home water filter is one of the best simple, low-cost home improvements you can add to your kitchen.
Home water filters do a good job of providing plenty of fresh, pure and good tasting drinking water from your taps. A good one can be extremely easy to install.
And then you can bottle your own pure drinking water, for pennies per gallon. You can use glass bottles (perfect in terms of water purity) or any of a growing number of quality non-leaching water bottles available.
You’ll never worry again about bottled water vs tap water.
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