Tap Water vs. Bottled Water

Finally, someone has answered the question on the parched lips of tens of thousands of athletes: "Does the buck and a half that I pay for bottled water buy me anything other then a clear plastic bottle? " This short piece in the New York Times looks at two studies, one conducted five years ago by The Archives of Family Medicine, and one done six years ago by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Archives study looked at  57 samples of bottled water to the tap water in Cleveland and found that while 39 samples of the bottled water were cleaner than tap, more than a dozen had at least 10 times the bacterial levels found in the city’s water. The NRDC test examined more than 1,000 bottles of water sold under 103 brand names. The Times reports that two-thirds were deemed "good quality," while the other third were contaminated – including many bottles from popular brands, some of which had samples containing "bacterial overgrowth."  So is bottle water any better than tap water?  Sometimes.