From:
Barbara Carlson
Date: 2002-02-20 10:17:00 UTC
Subject: Re: bottled water
--On Tuesday, February 19, 2002 11:53 PM +0000
Ferret-Health-list@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> To the best of my knowledge, distilled water is the purest you can get.
> Even if it is tasteless :) I don't know about filtered waters. But spring
> water can vary from batch to batch.
A number of years ago I read an article about bottled water. Someone went
all over the country and bought various kinds of bottled water ...
distilled, spring, mineral, etc. and all brands ... generic, Avian, Nala,
etc. What they found was that in *many* there were unacceptable levels of
all sorts of things ranging from arsenic to bacteria to some mildly
radioactive element! At that time, I believe distilled water was judged to
be the safest (since it's boiled to distill it). Cost didn't seem to matter
all that much -- expensive bottled water had problems, too. I don't know
what the state of bottled water is right now (I believe it was at least 8
years ago that I read the article), but I'd bet it's pretty much the same.
The article concluded that city tap water run through a filter (there was a
whole other review of various filters) was probably the safest, cheapest
water. Distilled came next. Well water varies all over the place, depending
on location (ranging from really clean to downright dangerous).
Some of the nasty chemicals apparently leeched out of the plastic bottle
while it was being stored. Some types of plastic were worse at exuding
chemicals than others.
After reading this, I decided that I'd be better off just using my tap
water and running it through a Brita filter.
--Barb--