Drink Tap Water

I know many of us, myself included, occasionally drink bottled water. We may think it's convenient, it's healthy, it's safer than tap water but this isn't all true. Bottled water is detrimental to our environment, our health, and certainly doesn't help our pocketbooks either. My message is simple: Drink tap water.

What is in bottled water? Recently the Coca-Cola Company has taken some heat for the contents of it's Dasani water bottles. The picture on the bottle led many consumers to believe the bottles were filled with spring water while in fact it was filled with purified tap water. If you have a purifier on your kitchen faucet, you've been drinking Dasani water for free. All About Water, an online resource, has said "An estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle-sometimes further treated, sometimes not."

You may be thinking about the recent tap water scare. Many news agencies reported stories about contaminates in tap water. The small print in many of those stories announced that the minimal amount of pharmaceuticals and other contaminants found in the public water system posed no threat to our health.

Now think about this. Tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Known for the strict standards the EPA tests tap water four times as often as the FDA tests bottled water. Loopholes in the FDA's policies allow water that is bottled and sold in the same state to go virtually unregulated. So we don't even know what is in many of those bottles?

The National Resources Defense Council concluded, "While much tap water is indeed risky, having compared available data, we conclude that there is no assurance that bottled water is any safer than tap water."