What Is The Healthiest Bottled Water? (It's A Trick Question)

Picture by LeeBrimelow on Flickr

The first thing I learned when researching what is the healthiest bottled water was: drink tap water.

According to the Environmental Working Group's 2011 Bottled Water Scorecard, nine out of the ten best-selling brands of bottled water could not answer at least one of the following key questions:

Key Health Questions Regarding Bottled Water:

1. Where does the water come from?
2. Is it purified; and if so, how?
3. Have tests found any contaminants?

How is it possible that mega-popular brands like Aquafina and Dasani can't answer a simple question like where their water comes from? How can we be sold a product so essential for life -- and so intimately connected to our health -- like water and not be informed about these basic things? And why don't we care more?

Eight of the ten top-selling bottled water brands scored a D or F for transparency (how well they answered the key questions above) in the EWG scorecard. More than half of the 173 brands flunked the EWG transparency test. And there was less transparency in 2010 than there was in 2009, a troubling trend. Why aren't these companies providing more information about where their water comes from and how it has been treated -- what are they hiding?

Because if we are not being provided with this vital data, we could be drinking another state's plain tap water instead of the gourmet beverage we thought we were purchasing (and this apparently actually happens); we could think we are making the healthier choice buying bottled water over tap, but the very opposite could be true!

Only three brands made it to a "B" on the EWG scorecard:

The Highest-Ranking Bottled Water On The EWG 2011 Scorecard:

* Gerber Pure Purified Water
* Nestle Pure Life Purified Water
* Penta Ultra-Purified Water

But the number-one drinking water recommendation on the EWG report was to drink filtered tap water. It is cheaper, way better for the environment, and you have better control over purification. Plus: you don't have the BPAs from the plastic packaging contaminating the water.

You can read the entire EWG 2011 Scorecard here and see how your preferred brand stacks up.

Of course, once I read all this I decided to drink filtered tap water. Helpfully, the EWG site makes it easy to find out all the contaminants discovered in your local drinking water -- and reading that rather dire information took me deeper down the rabbit hole, and will be the subject of a future post.

In the meantime -- stay hydrated!