Is there something in the water?

I drink nothing but tap lately and it’s fine. In fact if one only drinks bottled water one is missing the fluoride which is added to our drinking water.

My towns water is disgusting. You couldnt pay me to drink it, so instead i drink bottled waters.

seriously it smells like eggs

Unless you live in Jersey..:P

I find that tap water tastes nasty—usually the chlorine bothers me the most, I can not identify the other offensive flavors. I have a Brita filter on the kitchen tap, and use a Bruta pitcher so the drinking water is double-filtered.

We had a similar thread before, and someone was talking about Reverse Osmosis water, which I have yet to try.

What in the heck is Reverse Osmosis water?! o.O

Hmm similar thread you say (searches).

@SeventhSense: you got something against Jersey?

Flouride as a water additive is actually pretty controversial. Our town does not add it.

Reverse Osmosis water is water that has been run through an RO machine which goes through membranes to remove all the impurities in the water. Most of the time machines have a 2–1 ratio so for every 1 gallon of good clean water it puts out, theres 2 gallons of junk water. You can also find an RO machine for under 100 bucks on ebay.

I’m on my iPhone, so I can’t post links; but there was a Wikipedia article on it.

And I use stainless steel water bottles to put my filtered water in and carry it with me.

@NaturalMineralWater
Here it is

@hearkat
ya the water :)

Bottled water isn’t all the rage anymore because we are seeing just how much waste bottled water brands produce. What’s all the rage these days where I live are stainless steel water bottles filled with filtered water from their own tap.

Many bottled water manufacturers have been found to be giving their customers tap water.

TCH brings up a good point: The increasing waste created by the plastic bottle industry.

For me reduced waste is just one reason; I also wonder about the safety of the plastics, since they keep discovering that things once deemed safe actually do seep into our foods and beverages.

We have flouride in the tap water in the area where I live. Personally, I have no problem with that. Most of Sacramento has great tasting tap water but in the unincorporated part of Sac where I live the water is hard and tastes like crap. We have a filter that runs through our refrigerator and we drink that. We also buy water bottles and refill them a few times with our own filtered water. After five or so times we put them in the recycle bin and open new ones.

@AstroChuck
Fluoride is good.

@SeventhSense- No it’s not. It’s a commie plot! Haven’t you seen Dr. Strangelove?

We use bottled water in the car, for travel, and we have a filter on our drinking water faucet in the house.

Ahhh yes, but now we just seed the clouds and the chem trails will send the water down into the reserviors and into the water table. :)

“Bottled water is the second largest salable beverage, by quantity, in the United States. Its popularity is on the rise, on a global scale.” [ Bottled Water Statistics ]

different parts of the world have different water qualities, so I don’t know about where you live. It’s true that the water in some of the cities I’ve recently lived in is REALLY bad. There is a rise in hormone-related problems in a couple of them, and I developed a rash everytime I had a shower with the water in Bydgoszcz. I still drink most of the tap water unless it’s salty or something. I once got sick that way, but most of the time I’m fine. I don’t think that having 7 green ears has anything to do with that.

7 green ears?

My curiosity only started with water really. My deep seeded question which I had no capability of expressing had something to do with the subtle (yet apparent) changes in society which lead to a butterfly effect of change in society as a whole. Bottle water is only one. It continues with cell phones, mp3 players, changes in the law, amendments to traditional policy….

My brain is madly erratic and is usually inclined to bivouac itself near some thought or idea on one step of the staircase. Occasionally I slide down the banister.

Bottled water is a waste of material and money. Landfills are full of palstic bottles that do not degrade and fule is used for shipping water (water!) around the world. Daisani (the Coke bottled water) is just the local tap water of the bottling plant in bottles. I realize that the tap water is bad tasting in some areas but a filtration system on your tap or fridge or a Brita container in the fridge takes care of that. You can bring water with you on the road in a reusable container.

I guess Ido get crochety and irascible sometimes! :-)

We have one of those Brita filters on our faucet…so we use tap with the filter. I also use little bottles of water for when we go out, but its rare that we actually buy bottled water.

Sorry for my typos – too late to edit. “plastic’ and “fuel” is what I meant.

I definitely think there is something in water that we need. But it isn’t an additive. It is the water itself. As a consumer culture we completely forgot about the necessity of water until it became the fad. Okay that is a bit of an exaggeration but you get the drift.

Tap systems are a bit scary. It isn’t the tap water itself that is bad. It is the pipes. I think many people overlook that. Anyhow I recommend that everyone test their water if they are going to drink from the tap. We tested ours and it was not pretty. So for taste and health reasons we started using bottled water. Then we realized some people add salt to the bottled water so we started drinking only certain bottled waters. And then we realized that plastics are horrible for you. They leach chemicals and you drink them. It’s nasty. So we switched to a water filter on the tap. So far this works wonderfully. It filters out most of the nastiness of the pipes. And it doesn’t leach chemicals that we drink up. I think this is the best choice and most others I know agree.

Just in case anyone is interested, here is an article I submitted for my monthly squadron newsletter about Tap Water vs. Bottled Water. It makes for some interesting reading.

Water considerations – bottled water vs. tap water

Sales of bottled water have exploded in recent years, largely as a result of a public perception of purity driven by advertisements and packaging labels. In reality, bottled water sold in the United States is not necessarily cleaner or safer than most tap water according to a four-year scientific study recently made public by NRDC (National Resources Defense Council).

NRDC’s study included testing of more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. While most of the tested waters were found to be of high quality, some brands were contaminated. About one-third of the waters tested contained levels of contamination including synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic. At least one sample exceeded allowable limits under either state or bottled water industry standards or guidelines.

A key NRDC finding is that bottled water regulations are inadequate to assure consumers of either purity or safety although both the federal government and the states have bottled water safety programs. At the national level, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for bottled water safety but the FDA’s rules completely exempt waters that are packaged and sold within the same state which account for between 60 and 70 percent of all bottled water sold in the United States (roughly one out of five states don’t regulate these waters either). The FDA also exempts carbonated water and seltzer and fewer than half of the states require carbonated waters to meet their own bottled water standards.

Even when bottled waters are covered by the FDA’s rules, they are subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water. For example, bottled water is required to be tested less frequently than city tap water for bacteria and chemical contaminants. In addition, bottled water rules allow for some contamination by E. coli or fecal coliform (which indicate possible contamination with fecal matter), contrary to tap water rules which prohibit any confirmed contamination with these bacteria. Similarly, there are no requirements for bottled water to be disinfected or tested for parasites such as cryptosporidium or giardia unlike the rules for big city tap water systems that use surface water sources. This leaves open the possibility that some bottled water may present a health threat to people with weakened immune systems such as the elderly, some infants, transplant or cancer patients, and people with HIV/AIDS.

The benefit of tap water again is the monitored levels of fluoride from processing. Bottled water does not have the same oversight.

Fluoride and the Water Supply from kidshealth.org
For over 60 years, water fluoridation has proved to be a safe and cost-effective way to reduce dental caries. Today, water fluoridation is estimated to reduce tooth decay by 20 to 40%. As of 2002, the CDC statistics show that almost 60% of the U.S. population receives fluoridated water through the taps in their homes. Some communities have naturally occurring fluoride in their water; others add it at water-processing plants.

@SeventhSense They don’t have flouride in the water where I live. Or not enough to help the teeth if they do. It’s talked about all the time. It would have been really helpful to me if they did.

@RedPowerLady
What do I look like the Water Authority? J/K

@SeventhSense oh I thought you were :)

Well sometimes. :)~

@SeventhSense now you got me seriously cracking up

If there’s nothing in the water, it wouldn’t be very healthy. This is why we don’t drink distilled/deionized water.

@AstroChuck if the water tastes like crap, then stop drinking out of the toilet!