Yikes!  I just read this post over at Living the Fruity Life.  It’s all about the weird, yucky, harmful things that manage to find their way into our drinking water.  The post is very interesting and informative and I encourage all of you to get your read on.

I’ve always thought of our tap water as being pretty safe because of Gavin Newsom’s (mayor of San Francisco) crusade against bottled water.  Even though we don’t live in San Francisco anymore, our water here in the ‘burbs comes from the same place.  For extra protection, we have  Pur filter on our tap.  But even if our water doesn’t have Viagra and Prozac in it, it does have chlorine and fluoride.  Even though my daughter’s dentist is a fan of fluoridated water, I’ve always had my doubts since I’m a purist when it comes to what I eat and drink.  If I’m eating a salad, I just want vegetables– no pesticides, fungicides or any other -cides.  Likewise, if I’m drinking water, I just want hydrogen and oxygen– good old H2O.  I’m especially leery  if the government makes a point of telling you how “good” is it for you.  Their track record isn’t so good when it comes to being concerned about our health (remember, they think it’s safe to allow farmers to treat animals meant for food with growth hormones and antibiotics).

So does that mean I should start buying distilled water?  I think this decision requires more research on my part and will be a tough sell for my husband who thinks buying bottled water is like flushing money down the toilet.  My opposition to bottled water is over the facts that (1) in most cases, it’s just tap water packaged into plastic bottles, (2) plastic bottles contain BPA and (3) the waste that the plastic bottles generate.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, supplying the plastic water bottles that American consumers purchase in one year requires more than 47 million gallons of oil, the equivalent of one billion pounds of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere. More than one billion plastic water bottles end up in California’s landfills each year, taking 1000 years to biodegrade and leaking toxic additives such as phthalates into the groundwater.

Isn’t it funny that people opt for bottled water over fear of what is in their tap water only to have the discarded plastic bottles leak toxins into groundwater?  Interesting cycle.  The only way I know of for buying already distilled water is in plastic bottles, so that’s out.

Perhaps I will look at getting a home distiller and then a shower head filter.  I just thought about all of the gunk that accumulates on my glass shower door.  Sure, some of it is soap scum, but the rest is buildup from additives in our water.  Particularly disgusting when you think about all of that gunk being put into your body.

Certainly gives you lots to think about.