Is Bottled Water Good For You?

Is Bottled Water Good For You?

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Drinking plenty of water in order to stay healthy, function efficiently and avoid dehydration is generally recognised as essential by most people these days. Exactly how much water you need to drink will vary from person to person based upon body mass, physical size, the level of physical activity in which you are engaged and ambient conditions. Between six and eight large glasses of water per day seems to be the general consensus among medical authorities.

This medical advice has been one of the factors used in the advertising campaigns of bottled water suppliers in order to market their product. The market for bottled water is quite a recent development - but it is huge. Sales of bottled water have more than doubled in the period between 1997 and 2005 - in excess of 200 billion bottles of water are sold worldwide every year.

That's a huge number of empty plastic bottles being discarded. Some - a little under a quarter according to current estimates - are recycled. The rest end up as landfill. The environmental impact is significant. It has been estimated that if all those empty bottles were to be lined up end to end that they would cover a distance which was enough to get to the moon and back - 56 times!

The carbon emissions produced both in the production of the bottles and their subsequent transportation to their final destination is also a cause for concern. It's an astonishing fact that the production of the bottles requires three times more water than they will contain when they are shipped.

Bottled water is, simply put, an environmental disaster. Of course, you may be more concerned with your own health than that of the planet's - which could be perfectly understandable in some cases. The trouble with this line of thought is that there is absolutely no evidence that bottled water is in any way better for your health than common or garden tap water.

The water which comes out of the tap in both Europe and North America is perfectly safe to drink and undergoes very rigorous quality checks as a matter of course. Bottled water has been found to contain both uranium and estrogen. Many of the chemicals which can be found in bottled water "leech" from the actual plastic (PET) of the bottles. It's also been found that many bottled waters contain, in addition to other minerals, salt - which is not very good for hypertension sufferers.

The only conceivable reason that you might want to drink bottled water would be the taste. However, blind taste tests tend to suggest that the majority of consumers cannot differentiate between tap water and bottled water. Of course, if you live in a hard water area, or if you really don't like the taste of the water from your tap (possibly due to chlorine which water suppliers often use to kill bacteria) you might want to look at other alternatives.

You might consider a home filtration system of some kind. This would not only be better for your health but also better for the environment - and it would save you a fair bit of money compared with using bottled water. You can get whole house water filters, filters which mount directly on to taps, under sink filters and very simple (and cheap) reusable jug filters. Any of these solutions will remove contaminants and pollutants, give you fresh tasting water and counteract the effects of hard water in an environmentally friendly and cost effective manner.

About the Author:
A Brita water filter will provide you with great tasting water - and it's both economical and environmentally friendly too.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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