Tap Water? That stuff’ll kill ya!
When offered a glass of water, my mock-disgust reply always used to be, “Never touch the stuff…” It just tasted bad. Then, a few years back, I found that my reoccurring cough and headaches vanished whenever I was hydrated enough. You can only drink so much tea, juice, and milk, so I had to add water into the mix. I started drinking bottled water. Woo-hoo! Where did the bad taste go?
But recently, there has been lots of bad press and activism against bottled water. Ann Arbor outlawed city purchases of bottled water, unless it was their own tap water - just rebottled. Their rationale was to remind consumers that “tap water is as good as bottled water”. Um, no. Cities around the country are also picking up torches and pitchforks.
But now that I know what good water tastes like, I understand why I never liked tap water. It’s the chlorine! So this “Back to tap water!” campaign really annoys me. People, why would you want to drink dilute chlorine solution at a concentration lethal to a goldfish? I’m just sayin’. Goldy was tryin’ to tell you something, floating on top of the aquarium there.
There is agenda-driven politics and the consequent hysterical press, and then there is peer-reviewed science. Although smaller studies were individually ambiguous, when you pool the data, tap water can give you bladder cancer. Same as when they pooled all the data a decade and a half earlier. (In science, nobody ever believes older studies, so they keep repeating research at fifteen-year intervals.) Who would have imagined that continual exposure to chlorine for many decades might not be healthy? *cough, cough* Notice in the recent study that even beverages made with tap water are safer. You make them; then they sit for a while, which has the same effect as making water goldfish-safe by letting the chlorine volatiles evaporate.
Check out your own tap water in the Environmental Working Group’s National Tap Water Quality Database. They include data on contaminants not regulated by any agency, and thus not being monitored by other means. (You can even send them a few bucks to keep them at it, if you want.)