By Dr MERCOLA
Bottled water isn't necessarily any purer than the water you get from your tap - it's just more expensive.
The Environmental Working Group tested 10 major bottled-water brands.
Thirty-eight low-level contaminants turned up in the water, with each brand containing an average of eight chemicals. Disinfection products, caffeine, Tylenol, nitrate, industrial chemicals, arsenic and bacteria were all detected.
Two brands contained disinfection byproducts at levels that exceeded California's bottled-water standards, and bottles of Wal-Mart's Sam's Choice bought in the Bay Area contained trihalomethanes, which have been linked to cancer and miscarriages.
In fact, the Wal-Mart water and a brand sold on the East Coast by the Giant supermarket chain were “chemically indistinguishable from tap water.”
The United States sold 2.6 billion cases, not bottles, of bottled water in 2006, according to Beverage Digest, which equates to U.S. consumers spending about $15 billion on bottled water in one year.
Worldwide sales top out at more than $35 billion.However, the market for bottled water may be drying up.
Brands like Aquafina and Poland Spring are now experiencing a sales drought. After almost a decade of triple and then double-digit growth, sales volume grew less than 1 percent for the first half of 2008, Beverage Digest reports.
Personally, I feel this is good news. Not only is paying for bottled water like paying for gravity, but the plastic chemicals leaching out of the bottles have now been proven highly toxic to your body, and our landfills are overflowing with plastic bottles that do not biodegrade.
Last but not least, paying premium prices for bottled water, thinking it’s more pure than your local water supply, has also been proven to be a complete fallacy.
The Questionable Safety of Bottled Water
The fact that water is bottled is NOT an assurance of purity. In fact, about 40 percent of bottled water IS regular tap water, which may or may not have received any additional treatment.
Most municipal tap water -- though generally far from pure -- must actually adhere to stricter purity standards than the bottled water industry.
In a previous study, a third of more than 100 bottled water brands tested for contaminants were found to contain chemicals like arsenic and carcinogenic compounds at levels exceeding state or industry standards for municipal water supplies.