Quote Originally Posted by fly boy View Post
this is by no means an attack, just a curiosity question....... I grew up drinking tap water, and still to this day drink it (Even in Wichita Falls - look up toilet to tap). The local filtering takes out all the bad things, and in some cases actually put things back into the water. Why in this day in age are so many people adamant about drinking "purified" or "bottled" water? Just curious is all.
A good portion of it is marketing. In the 60-90s, chlorine levels, and some nasties, were much higher than today and in some respects, that helped create a water filter industry that has fought to survive in the last decade. When a company can sell $10 of materials for $100 (water filtration system) and $.06 cost bottle of water for $1.00 and more, free enterprise says go for it. Denver Water is some of the best in the country with no violations in the recent past and contaminant and disinfectant levels well below the Federal requirements. Here is the current Denver Water Report: http://www.denverwater.org/docs/asse...lityReport.pdf

All water districts have such reports and most are self explanatory.

However, and especially if you live in an old house, that is not what is delivered at your faucet. You have a service lateral and residential plumbing. In old neighborhoods, your service lateral can be a lead pipe, galvanized pipe or even a steel or copper pipe with old style lead solder. The first slug of water from a lead pipe in the morning can have lead concentrations over the allowable limits. So there are cases where drinking and cooking water should be filtered. If you have a newer home, 1990s built or more current, the use of a water filter for drinking water in the Denver Metro area is likely a waste of money. I use tap water and we drink from the fridge water that has a taste and odor filter only.

RO and ultra-purified water is actually, from a health perspective, harmful to drink as it will pull nutrients out of your digestive tract. Cooking with it (like veggies) extracts the nutrients as well. Pure water is an organic solvent. One of my fellow lab techs (when I worked in a water quality lab for a pharmaceutical company) thought the whole drinking pure water thing was urban legend and so he decided to drink the most pure water we made (suitable for injection and a carrier for water based drugs) and at about a month he ended up in the hospital, very sick, malnourished and all kinds of issues. He recovered, but it took 6 months.

Bottled water, in most cases, is tap water run through a taste and odor filter. If you buy commercially bottled water that is packaged in a state outside of CO, you are drinking water with a worse quality than your tap water. In the past decade, the biggest fear has been metabolized (used and the byproducts enter the sewer) and non-metabolized (active ingredients) pharmaceuticals. There has been research, but a lot of it is being suppressed and, for the most part, there can be no control or human tests. This is especially worrisome for persons who are on prescribed drugs and the potential interactions, or pregnant women and children. If I lived in CA, TX, or any of the Midwest to Southeast states. and had a family member using prescription drugs, young kids or planning on having kids, I would use a purification system for drinking water and then add a mineral pack back into the water.

I do actually work on municipal water systems as a consultant and have an educational and experiential background in water quality and water purification systems in case anyone wonders.