Does this bottled water make me look fat?
by ken winston caine
It is possible that bottled water is making you fat . . . and that it causes cancer.
Really.
The plastic bottles of designer water that you see people carrying everywhere are NOT good for you…
Packaging water in small plastic bottles has staggering environmental costs — both in the manufacturing process and in the waste-stream created when the bottles are used and tossed in the trash. You’re beginning to read a lot about that aspect of the $15 billion bottled-water obsession.
What you’re not hearing about — yet — are the little-known, but severe, personal health costs — the long-term damage you can suffer from consuming foods and liquids packaged and stored in plastic or plastic-lined containers.
It may take mainstream health and media another 10 years to get onto this. But you shouldn’t wait. You should get onto it now.
Click that link and read the article.
Should you stop drinking water?
Should you stop carrying water with you?
No.
No, no, no, no, no…
The solution is simple:
Get your own inexpensive filter
1. Buy a good-quality kitchen-sink carbon-block-filter water filter.
Some connect directly to the tap. Some are easily installed out of site under the sink and even have their own, attractive, filtered-water tap. These have been around since the ’70s. They cost from $15 to $175 (with some high-end models selling for more).
They filter impurities and bad taste from your municipally treated tap water and produce a delicious water equal to, and in many cases superior to, commercially bottled water.
The better units produce high quality, clean tasting water for from 1 cent to 10 cents per gallon, depending upon brand of filters used. So not only do you get known high quality water, but you save a LOT of money, too.
The $300 Seagull unit that I’ve been using for more than two decades will even remove the salt from seawater — and at a cost of 3 cents per gallon! It meets U.S. standards as a water purifier, not just a water filter.
Carry your own non-disposable glass (or stainless steel) bottle
2. Carry your own bottle(s) each day filled with your own home-filtered water.
Use glass (or lightweight steel) bottles, though. For your health.
While I’ve been writing about this since the early ’90s, mainstream health is only beginning to consider the extensive animal — and human — research showing multiple deleterious health effects from consuming foods and liquids packaged in various plastics.
Avoid plastic containers
Plastic leaches toxins into foods and liquids, as well as infuses them with the hormone-like, hormone-altering compounds that I was writing about 15 years ago.
It very likely plays a huge (and unrecognized) role in the obesity epidemic, as well as being a prime contributing factor in cancers and a multitude of modern diseases.
I could never convince the rather conservative fact-checking department and editors that this was an issue we needed to pursue during my years at Rodale in the ’90s. But the science is increasingly clear. I bet Rodale publications will be on this pretty soon.
(The issue here is not just water stored in plastic, but all foods stored in plastics. And nearly all foods are these days. Even canned ones. The cans have been lined with epoxy since sometime in the early ’80s. Even cardboard milk cartons. Used to be they were waxed. Now they are plastic coated. And the issue is not just foods cooked in plastic. It’s food stored in plastic.)
Find some glass bottles you like and re-use them. If you’re a fashion snob, find and invest in some beautiful flasks with water-tight lids. Very classy. And if you’re a more earthy type, typical quart canning jars can do the job just fine.
Or buy one of the new, lightweight stainless steel drinking water bottles. I picked up a 1 litre one for $13 at Vitamin Cottage in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In the early ’70s, I carried a corked, green-glass wine bottle that I kept filled with drinking water. Its long neck would poke out the top flap of my canvas backpack.
It worked well, most of the time.
One morning I was awakened by a wrinkle-faced, gray-headed, gray-bearded stranger. I was in my sleeping bag on the lawn of the Institute for the Advancement of Human Potential in Berkeley, Calif. The institute allowed travelers, visitors and what we now call the homeless to crash on their grounds for free. Maybe 20 other people were asleep on the lawn.
I was awakened by this guy kneeling on the ground and shaking my shoulder urgently. Soon as I opened my eyes, he said, “Could you spare a little eye-opener for a needy stranger?”
He spoke in an Irish brogue.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“What?” I said, peering around quickly to size up the situation.
He was pointing at my backpack which lay beside my head. “A little eye-opener,” he said. I realized he was focusing on the neck of the wine bottle.
“That’s just water,” I said. “You don’t want that.”
“Oh, come on. Laddie. Let me be the judge of that,” he said.
“OK,” I said, “knock yourself out.”
He eagerly grabbed the bottle, popped the cork and tipped it back, and let the liquid start to pour down his throat. Then choking and spitting and spraying water everywhere, as though it was poison, he sputtered and stuttered, “That’s, that’s WATER!”
And he had this horrified and hurt look on his face.
Clean, pure water is essential to your health. Water stored in plastic containers is not clean, pure, water — and is actually compromising your health.
And, yes, it’s messing with your endocrine system which, indeed, might be making you fat.
Some similar posts:
- Not Exactly
August 17th, 2007 11:06
Wow! I drink a lot of water, and nearly always directly out of plastic bottles. Are you sure tap water is healthier? What does a water purifier filter out?
August 17th, 2007 11:07
Btw., I just encountered some errors when commenting, but the comment seemed to come through.
August 17th, 2007 12:04
Hi uberdose:
MUCH of the bottled water sold IS tap water. It is municipal water system water that bottlers run through additional treatment such as charcoal, UV and reverse osmosis filtering which removes most remaining solids, metals, pesticides, chlorines, bacteria and viruses.
The Natural Resources Defense Council reported recently that about 30% of bottled water sold is drawn from municipal water supplies.
Aquafina, a huge player in the U.S. market, for instance, uses municipal tap water that is filtered. (And then put in plastic bottles and marked up several thousand percent and sold everywhere.)
The better carbon-block sink (and undersink) filters are equally effective at removing bad taste, impurities and hazards from municipally treated water… The municipal treatment itself is government certified to remove a litany of hazards — but usually adds at least one: chlorine, which is pesticide-like in the body and which tastes and smells awful and which can mix with other chemcials and create a new toxic brew.
The real issues here are twofold:
1. The plastic bottling.
a. Plastics are a petroleum-based product, deplete natural resources and generate pollution in their manufacture.
b. Plastics endanger your health because they leach toxic and hazardous compounds into the food and liquids they store. And
c. Plastics do not biodegrade naturally, are not widely recycled (despite the hype), and are responsible for much of the bulk in landfills and endanger sealife when dumped in the oceans (one way municipalities get rid of their waste).
2. The exotic spring waters that are imported cause immense amounts of carbon release into the atmosphere from bottle manufacture and transport.
ALSO, thanks for the heads-up about the comment-posting problem. THINK it’s fixed. Apparently the subscribe-to-comments plug-in was imcompatible with the latest version of WordPress that I upgraded to recently. Just installed an upgraded version of the plug-in and from here it seems to be working. (Hope it really is.)
Please ALWAYS let me know if you encounter any problems on this site.
November 1st, 2007 09:51
[...] • Does this bottled water make me look fat? [...]
May 29th, 2009 04:29
ya its kinda funny how you just veered off your main topic of how they make you gain weight, n didnt really explain how, its becuase water CANT make you gain fat, anyone who thinks otherwise is a fuckin tard, water is water no matter what it comes in you fuckin tree huggings faggots
May 29th, 2009 20:44
Nick, it’s because estrogen-like chemicals in the plastic bottles leach into the water. So you’re drinking a strange estrogen-like cocktail when you drink water bottled in plastic and THAT can wreak havoc with your encrocrine system. Which is why you’re so fat and have such a small penis.
Pure water is pure water. But water contaminated with outgassed toxins and hormonal substances is not pure water no matter how clear it looks.
Best,
kwc
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