| Personally I always was amazed at the counts of heterotrophic in the samples of bottled water I analysed (I'm microbiologist and the lab I used to work at would do the water analysis of pretty much all the towns, cities and wells of the eastern half of the Quebec province). Every year we'd have high school students coming to our lab with bottled water asking us for analysis for their science project. Canada used to have a regulation on the acceptable number of those you can find in potable water (the analysis is still routinely done, as one of the parameters to assess the general quality of the water, but to have a low count isn't actually part anymore of the requirements to allow distribution to the public) and the bottled water I saw pretty much always exceeded the maximum allowed, but since it wasn't tap water it never fell under the regulations in place at the time.
Then there's of course the simple fact that you have water sitting there and sucking shit out of the bottle for god knows how long.
The way I see it, the bottled water industry is legit for selling water in a convenient bottle you can buy anywhere and carry with you (duh): it's a disposable bottle business. But people buying said bottled water as the healthy way to get your daily water intake? Now im puzzled. From a microbiological stand point, bottled water's quality is very average at best (funny thing, it's those who would average the best scores were usually well known bottled tap water). If you're in the middle of a shopping mall and your choices are a bottle of coke or a bottle of water, the latter is the healthy solution, but any more than that is a waste of money on an expensive product of subpar quality. |