Danger of Bottled Water

We all have used them at a certain point. We all love them. They are convenient, they are comfortable and they provide fresh, clean, crisp water for you and your family. The danger of bottled water are not immediately apparent when you first purchase it. Isn’t that funny though? The bottled water industry and the plastic industry decided to take our natural resources, bottle them and then sell them back to us for billions of dollars of profit! It’s great! Well. Not so much. In fact this makes me angry that they would do such a thing. So there are a few things that I want to discuss in this post. I will not go into too much depth with the fill-yourself style bottled water , also known as water canisters or canteens. However, I’m more going into the cases of bottled water that are disposable when done.

What is actually in the bottled water that you drink? Do you think that it is the pure glacial water that the companies are marketing to you or could something more sinister going on. Primarily, one needs to understand that bottled water recalls go heavily under reported in the industry. There have been plenty of recalls associated with bottled water, though the public may not know about it. Many popular brands within the last 10 years have had recalls associated with them. The other issues with this water is that there is a lack of quality control in the bottling process, manufacturing and testing. The us government, including the FDA and EPA, really have poor and confusing quality standards that may have an effect on the absolute quality of bottled water. Keep in mind, this does not necessarily mean that the quality is poor, it just means that there is a lack of responsibility in the bottling process. By no means is bottled water as regulated as tap water.

In fact, in the 90s Perrier, a common brand of bottled water, was cited for containing benzene in the water. You must know from the previous article that sodium benzoate  may degrade to benzene under acidic conditions, like that in Coca Cola, and create a very dangerous carcinogen. This was found in Perrier’s drinking water. YUCK! In addition, there have been instances of styrene, algae, yeast, tetrahydrofuran, sand, bacteria, chlorine, particulates of various sorts, crickets, sodium hydroxide, mold and even kerosene! The consumer recalls were followed by a notification for the consumers that occurred aboout 7 months later. At this point, the products may have already been consumed and it has been too late.

Essentially, bottled waters may contain high amounts of toxic substances that way exceed the FDA recommendations. This can be especially problematic because we really don’t know what is in the water. There can be so much variability in it.

By no means does the water dangers stop at the source and bottling plants. Because of the plastics used for the storage and the chemicals companies use to harden the plastics, they may leach dangerous amounts of BPA, which was gone over in a previous article. Not only does the water itself potentially contain dangerous amounts of chemicals, the plastic leaches into the bottles causing  a host of other problems. You should be ripping your hair out, if it hasn’t fallen out already, if you keep your bottles in the car or in sunlight for any amount of time. Heat and sun can actually degrade the plastic leaching more than just BPA. Make sure to keep all your plastic bottles away from heat and light if you want to survive!