Is it really that much better to have bottled (filtered) water after working out than tap?

Not in general, unless there is a specific issue with water quality in your town. The water treatement plant is supposed to post a periodic notice with your waterbill, and with the paper of record.

I feel it really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. Sure there are traces of chlorine and other stuff in tap water, but it’s still water. Your body will still absorb what it needs. I have heard somewhere and you can take it as just that half strength gatorade is more quickly metabolized than water alone. I don’t know about that, I stick with just plain water. much cheaper.

That definitely depends on the quality of tap water. One basic difference is chlorine which is tolerable from a lot of water systems but if you have a strong chlorine concentration in your tap water that stuff isn’t good for you any time and after a workout your tissues are healing and regenerating you probably don’t need extra hydrochloric acid added to your blood.
I suggest a chlorine filter on your tap at home and fill a few to take with you.

No. It is only proof that people will buy anything if the marketing is effective.

I will give you the basics of a Yahoo Finance Report I read this morning, concerning tap vs. bottled water. According to this report, tap water is much safer to drink than most bottled water. Why? Safety reguations by each state and the Federal Government. The tap water is suppose to be crystal clear and free of bacteria. They did not mention the chrlorine taste of tap water and how it ruins a cup of coffee.

Some states can advertise spring water on their bottles, but in reality it is only 55% spring water and the rest is tap water mixed in. This situation occurs when spring water is not transported from state to state. If the company is within the state and sells only in the state it does business, look out for the tap water.

Bottled water is a 2 billion dollar a year business. Bottled water is not nearly regulated as tap water, so who knows whats inside?

I know what this report has said, but I never drink tap water. I have pulled too man dead bodies out of it. It sometimes comes out the faucet as a yellow or rust color and that is a turnoff!!

I will contine to buy my imported Evian water. It has no after taste and is crystal clear.

Depends on where you live, and the age of the pipes in the building you’re in. The biggest objection to bottled water is the landfill waste created by the plastic bottles.

Using own filter would be far more effective and cheaper. The bottling companies don’t really do anything different than the municipal water. Invest in a decent filter of your own.

Tap water is fine, bottled water isn’t better for you. The only thing to remember is whatever button you press for the water from the fountain has germs like door handles, unless your fountain has a foot on and off.

Well you have a variety of answers here. I will add my own to add to the confusion. I use an ionic water machine. It removes all bacteria, chlorine, and all impurities except for 20% of the flouride (it’s too expensive to remove it all so I’m saving up for an additional water cleaner to remove that too). It also kills all dormant parasites (called parasite cysts) that are resistant to chemical sanitation efforts and come through municipal water systems.

My water has never tasted so good. I put it in a glass or metal container and take it with me where ever I go. I have noticed that my body seems to operate better (I don’t get dehydrated as quickly, and in general I feel better) with the alkaline water.

Bottled water is no better and sometimes worse. Environmentally it’s devastating. Watch The Story of Bottled Water

I have bought glass water bottles to avoid plastic toxins and save the environment. It’s cheaper too.

It depends on the tap water, and the bottled water. Some tap water exceeds government standards on pollutants, some bottled water is nothing but tap water in a bottle. At my house, the tap water is contaminated, so we drink filtered water, which we filter with a commercial table top filter.

@snowberry Is that essentially distilled water?

Filtered water may taste better than tap water (or may not), but there’s generally no safety difference between them in most areas.

No. It isn’t necessarily any better for you and it definitely isn’t better for the environment for us to have all those plastic bottles. We have good water here and don’t need to filter it etc. So I only tend to buy bottled water if I forget to take a water bottle. I then fill the bottles up from the tap and keep them in the fridge and use them a few times. I don’t use them too often because then I am concerned about the plastic and leaching chemicals etc. I really just want cold water. I don’t like water straight from the tap only because it isn’t really cold. I should mention I wash the bottles properly (as I would any drinking vessel) in between uses. Otherwise research has show bacteria does build up in the bottle.

An interesting article about water bottles link

Brita makes bottles that have the filter right in them, and take out most of the chemicals like chlorine.

I am lucky to have a 400’ well and gorgeous water. I use an old Snapple bottle as a water bottle, fill it up at the tap and throw several ice cubes in it. For something larger, a quart glass canning jar with a metal lid works just fine.

WATER IS WATER IS WATER.

@zen NOT SO!

@zen Has it exactly right. And that goes for homeopathic remedy water that costs $50 a bottle, bottled water or tap water. In a recent study, as much as 50% of the bottled water on typical grocery store shelves was found to be tap water.Because of the cholrine in it, tap water is less likely than bottled water to have bacteria in it. If also proviides us a source of fluorine to protect our teeth. And, it doesn’t clutter up our landfills, our parks and rivers with empty plastic bottles. America uses enough bottled water every year that if all the bottles were hooked end to end, they would stretch around the Earth 19 times.

If you don’t like the taste of the chlorine in tap water, buy a filtration system and run it through an activated charcoal filter. You’ll be doing the embattled environment, your health and the health of your bank account a big favor.

I am not sure which is more true.
1 — The bottled water industry proves the absolute genius of American marketers—selling people something they already have in abundant supply.
2 — The bottled water industry’s success shows how right the old adage is that claims, “There’s a sucker born every minute”

What will be next? Bottled air? Bottled dirt?

Though I bow before the Yarn’s giant brain – I must say that if you have decent tap – filter it – it’s fine almost everywhere – and I’ve been almost everywhere – never had a problem – never needed extra elecrolytes or anything. Brita is just icing on the cake – and the flouride and a little chlorine (think swimming pool) is fine too.

@zen The tap water in our area includes warnings that it exceeds the government approved levels of arsenic and is not potable for elderly or the very young.

There are many different types of water, some crystal clear, without any contaminates, and some so unsafe that they have been known to kill babies and elderly. In today’s world, Water is water is simply not true, and ignorance can be dangerous.

@zen Off topic, but how did you manage to get a screen-name this time that won’t allow a line to it?

Bottled water is just one more thing for them to sell. I think the media drills in all these ideas into people about tap water so we feel the need to buy buy buy. Tap water is not that bad, especially in the U.S. Maybe if you lived in a third world country I’d tell you to be a little more cautious about tap water. If it worries you that much just buy one of those water bottles with a filter that you can just keep refilling. They are only about 10 bucks at target and you wont have to buy another bottled water ever again. Your planet would really appreciate it :-)

Tap really isn’t that much different than bottled water. Honestly, the biggest difference is the price you pay. You pay for tap, but you pay much more for the little amount you get in bottle. They want you to think it’s more purified than the tap but in reality, it’s near the same process. The only real difference is that some tap is recycled water from your reservoir. The recycled water still goes through the same process to purify it. Some states/cities are better than others but they are all governed to give you water that is more than clean enough to give you what your body needs to stay hydrated.

I’d probably go bottled or filtered if I were in @YARNLADY‘s area, where the tap water suffers from problems such as hogh levels of arsenic. But aside from being expensive by most city’s standards, Boston water is good quality and tastes fine. And while it is costly vis-a-vis other regions, it is a ridiculous bargain compared to bottled water.

@ETpro You probably aren’t doing it with a _ before and a _ after it. _ zen _ but together of course – or it would just make it italicized.

_ ZEN _

@incendiary_dan and others who are interested. Do a search for acidic water uses in Japan on Google with the Scholar search filter. A number of articles comes up. We in the USA tend to assume that if it was not written by an American, it’s not worth reading, but honestly the Japanese have made some remarkable progress in health care using ionic water.

Ionic water is NOT distilled water. My machine is hooked up to the kitchen sink. It removes impurities, and by that I meant poisonous elements, parasite cysts, and too much iron or calcium, etc. It does not remove everything, because then it would not taste good, and many people do not do well drinking 100% distilled water. It produces 3 kinds of water: Acidic, Alkaline, and Purified. It’s self cleaning, and the filters are remarkably inexpensive. I just wish I had as good a water cleaner for the rest of the house because the garbage that comes out of the tap stinks! I mean it smells BAD!

You folks who insist that all tap water is fine would shudder to drink and bathe in my tap water!

@snowberry Neat! I was gonna say that it if was distilling, that tends to rob it of minerals which in turn robs you of minerals. That sounds pretty neat, though.

@ETpro insightful question I think “What will be next? Bottled air? Bottled dirt?” when I recently heard that Goldman Sachs has a substantial interest in (owns large tracts of) Patagonia and adjacent rainforest I joked that in 50 years we’ll be buying our oxygen from them. I sure hope I’m wrong about that.
ref “American marketers” you’re on to something very real but it’s global… Evian? ...French, Poland Springs is owned by Nestle now(Dutch). And both those companies have been at the forefront of privatizing municipal water systems around the world with the pretense of ‘improving service’

@zen I am just selecting what comes up int the drop-down list when I begin a paragraph with an @ symbol. What Fluther thinks I should use doesn’t work. I also tried copy and paste with an @ symbol in front of your pasted in new screen name. And I tried keying the entire user name string in accurately, as per what shows. None of these work. @ZEN doesn’t work either. Since the underscore before and after a string is a latex formatting convention for italicized text, I think the link builder has a conflict with it’s meaning.

Has anyone been able to link to a specific thread without using the Copy Link Location hack?