Stop drinking bottled water

One of the most important healthy eating habits we stress on Healthy Eating News is to drink plenty of water every day. But where do you get that water from? If you are buying bottled water, you are wasting your money on a costly, unsustainable product that does not provide added health benefits and is destroying the environment. Here are several reasons you should stop drinking bottled water:

Bottled water isn't a good value

If you are getting your bottled water by the bottle, you are probably paying twice as much as a gallon of gasoline. Gasoline has to be pumped out of the ground in the form of crude oil, shipped to a refinery (often halfway across the world), and shipped again to your local filling station. Many bottled waters are only filtered tap water and most tap water costs less than one cent per gallon! Why are you paying over 600 times as much as you need to? Even if you buy water at $1.00 per gallon that is more than 100 times as much as you need to pay! Don’t complain about the price of gasoline if you pay for bottled water.

Bottled Water is no healthier than tap water

You are fooling yourself if you think bottled water is healthier than tap water. Your tap water falls under the regulatory authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, and is regularly inspected for bacteria and toxic chemicals. Your tap water is filtered, sanitized, and tested for your safety. If you want to know how your community scores, Check out the Environmental Working Group's National Tap Water Database. Bottled water, however, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and requires no such practices and has no oversight with regard to contaminants unless it is shipped over state lines.

In March 1999, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report called "Bottled Water, Pure Drink or Pure Hype?" NRDC's report points out that as much as 40% of all bottled water comes directly from a city water system, just like tap water. The report also focuses on the fact that 60% to 70% of all bottled water sold in the U.S. is exempt from the FDA's bottled water standards, because the federal standards do not apply to water bottled and sold within the same state. Unless the water is transported across state lines, there are no federal regulations that govern its quality. Two of the largest tap water bottlers, Pepsi's Aquafina and Coca-Cola Co's Dasani are both made from purified water sourced from public reservoirs.

Bottled water is a waste

Bottled water produces up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year and, according to Food and Water Watch, that plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce. Although the plastic used to bottle beverages is of high quality and is in demand by recyclers, over 80 percent of plastic bottles are simply thrown away. Only about 12 percent of "custom" plastic bottles, a category dominated by water, were recycled in 2003, according to industry consultant R.W. Beck, Inc. That's 40 million bottles a day that went into the trash or became litter.

Plastic waste is now at such a volume that vast eddies of current-bound plastic trash now spin endlessly in the world's major oceans. This represents a great risk to marine life, killing birds and fish which mistake our garbage for food. Making plastic bottles for water uses up to 2,000 times more energy to produce and deliver than tap water. Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60-watt light bulb for up to six hours. Multiply that by 40 million bottles a day and you can see what a waste it is to drink water from plastic water bottles and not recycle them.

The corporatization of water

In the documentary film Thirst, authors Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman demonstrated the rapid worldwide privatization of municipal water supplies, and the effect these purchases are having on local economies. Water is being called the "Blue Gold" of the 21st century. Thanks to increasing urbanization and population, shifting climates and industrial pollution, fresh water is becoming humanity's most precious resource. Multinational corporations are stepping in to purchase groundwater and distribution rights wherever they can, and the bottled water industry is an important component in their drive to commoditize what many feel is a basic human right: the access to safe and affordable water.


What should you do?

1)  Adopt a great alternative to bottled water: buy a stainless steel water bottle and use it.

 2)  If you don't like the way your local tap water tastes buy an inexpensive carbon filter. It will make most tap water taste sparkling fresh at a fraction of bottled water's cost.

3)  Conserve water wherever possible, and keep up with local water issues.

4)  Consider taking Food and Water Watch's No Bottled Water Pledge.


Want to know more? Start with the Sierra Club's fact sheet on bottled water.

White House courts Game Developers to make Healthy Eating Games

Healthy eating starts with childhood habits.  In a video presentation at the Game Developers Choice Awards, White House chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra discussed the Apps for Healthy Kids project, a plan to encourage game developers to collaborate with government to work against childhood obesity.

The latest component, an Apps for Healthy Kids contest tasks game developers with creating games that help encourage good exercise and diet habits among kids and give parents information about what their children eat -- with $40,000 in prizes for the winning games. The apps, to be submitted in either "tool" or "game" categories, will integrate the data from MyFoodapedia.gov, a database of the caloric content of common food.
 In a letter, First Lady Michelle Obama told game developers, "You know better than most the power of games to deeply engage our nation's youth. Today I'm asking you to dedicate your creative energy skills to address one of America's biggest challenges and help make healthy living fun, exciting and relevant for kids."

The Apps for Healthy Kids competition is a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation. Apps for Healthy Kids challenges software developers, game designers, students, and other innovators to develop fun and engaging software tools and games that drive children, especially “tweens” (ages 9-12) – directly or through their parents – to eat better and be more physically active.

Childhood obesity or excess weight threatens the healthy future of one third of American children. The United States spends approximately $150 billion every year to treat obesity-related conditions, and that number is growing. Obesity rates tripled in the past 30 years, a trend that means, for the first time in our history, American children may face a shorter expected lifespan than their parents.

High Fructose Corn Syrup Implicated in Obesity

The number one key to healthy eating is to avoid refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup(HFCS).

In results published March 18 by the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute reported on two experiments looking into the connection between the use of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity. They found that high-fructose corn syrup leads to a significantly higher weight gain than regular table sugar, even when overall caloric intake is the same. In addition to causing considerable weight gain in lab tests, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides, which can lead to heart disease. “Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction.

The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a rapid rise of obesity in the United States, which correlates to the introduction of industrial-grade high-fructose corn syrup at the same time. The CDC reports that in the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed. In 1970, about 15 percent of the U.S. population were defined as obese; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese. On average, Americans consume 60 pounds of the high fructose corn syrup per person every year.

The researchers stated that they do not know why high-fructose corn syrup, (HFCS), led to more triglycerides and more body fat resulting in obesity but think it may be due to an uneven ratio of fructose to glucose when compared to sucrose, or table sugar. Sucrose is comprised of equal parts fructose and glucose (50/50), while typical high-fructose corn syrup has an uneven ratio, usually about 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of high-fructose corn syrup. Because of the manufacturing process for HFCS, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized. The researchers surmise that the excess fructose in HFCS is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.