Top 5 Reasons to Ditch Your Water Bottle Habit

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Bottled water is clean and healthy– or so their producers would have you believe. After all, marketers tirelessly bombard us with picturesque images of flowing alpine springs, pristine, ice-capped mountaintops and thin, attractive models downing a pint right before biking to the pilates studio.

使no mistake about it. Bottled water is big business, with worldwide sales projected to be between $50 and $100 billion a year. But is bottled water really any purer than ordinary tap water filtered in your home? Well, considering that many top brands are actually just filtered tap water, it's safe to say that bottled water is often times more pure hype than pure water.

Let’s acknowledge - that bottled waters are usually overpriced, sometimes unsanitary, and always damaging to the environment.

What contaminants will be included in bottled water?

Harmful Bacteria:How would you like to drink a nice colony of bacteria after your morning workout? When the NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) tested more than 1,000 water bottles, including 103 bottled water brands, the organization found that 1/3 of the brands contained arsenic, bacteria and synthetic organics exceeding allowable limits.

And the NRDC isn't alone. Canada's C-crest Laboratories, a pharmaceutical testing company in Montreal, found that 70% of the dozen bottled water brands it tested had high levels of heterotrophic bacteria, which can be pathogenic and cause infectious diseases like E. coli. The United States Pharmacopoeia says the heterotrophic bacteria in drinking water should not exceed 500 colony-forming units (CFUs) per milliliter, yet the highest recorded level from the sample was 80,000 CFUs per milliliter.

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