Better Living Through LESS Chemistry: Food & Water

by Russell A. Faust, PhD, MD

Bottled Water

It’s Embarrassing

Americans spend more money on bottled water than iPods or movie tickets!

Not that those are expenditures to be proud of.

It’s a WASTE

Americans churn through 2.5 Million plastic bottles EVERY HOUR of every day.  It is estimated that the amount of oil used to produce those bottles could fuel 1 Million cars for a year.  Doesn’t even include all those bottles from ‘soft drinks’.  What a waste.

For every liter of water that is put into a bottle, 3 liters are used: 1 in the botte, and 2 additional liters of water that are used to make the plastic bottle.  Then there is the amount of oil used to transport that water to where you and I can buy it.

What a waste.

And all for water that MOST bottling companies simply take from the tap, filter it, and bottle it.

It’s Deceptive

That’s right.  Those beautiful images of mountain glacier-fed streams on the bottle, and the natural-sounding names on the bottle – those have nothing to do with where the water came from.

That’s just marketing.

Nearly HALF of bottled water is simply filtered tap water!

Do it yourself and save the 2000 percent mark-up!

Wouldn’t it be more honest to show a beach covered with oil-soaked pelicans and plastic bottles washed up?

If that was the image that we connected with bottled water, how many of us would still be drinking bottled water?  It’s time that we all start making that connection, and stop drinking bottled water.

It’s Making a MESS of Our Environment

Most of these bottles are not even recycled.  We throw away 3.8 Billion water bottles every year.  Most of those end up in landfills.  Or on beaches all over the planet. That is an estimated $1 Billion of plastic.

What a waste.

In Our Food and Water

It’s Toxic

In addition to devastating our environment, those plastic bottles, and other plastics, contain volatile organic compounds (VOC’s).

Plastic Plastic Plastic

Bad for our environment.  Bad for us.  VOC’s and other toxins (PVC’s) in plastics contribute to allergies, asthma, various cancers, and birth defects.

Polyvinvyl chloride (PVC) is used for water bottles, and bottles for other things:

• salad dressing
• detergent
• cooking oil
• shampoo
• mouth wash, and other plastics like
• plastic wrap on meats
• baby’ teething rings
• baby pacifiers
• baby-bottle nipples, and
• toys

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The toxins that are in these plastics come out into our food and water, including:

Toxic Bis-pheno-A Derivative

• lead
• cadmium
• mercury
• phthalates
• diethyl hexphosphate

ALL of these are either neuro-toxins, or carcinogens, or BOTH.

I know – this is depressing, discouraging.

But you CAN make a difference. Here’s How:

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What To Do About It?

• Well to start with, stop drinking water from plastic bottles
• Use tap water
• Filter if you must (we do).  There are several great water filter systems, some pretty inexpensive, that will filter out most VOC’s and other toxins (check the boogor doctor’s Amazon Store on the right for filter systems)
• Don’t store your water in a plastic pitcher
• Use ceramic or glass
• And carry your water in an oh-so-cool stainless bottle.  There are many to choose from (check out the boogor doctor’s Amazon Store)
• Try to store food in glass or stainless containers
• And while we’re on the subject, for all the other liquid food items that come in plastic bottles, try to find them in glass bottles.  No BPA, VOC’s from those.

Check out stainless LunchBots for storing your kids’ lunches, instead of plastic. Yes, they’re pricey, but they last forever!

For carrying our water around, we like Klean Kanteen. (These links are for our Amazon Store; I am an affiliate). See link to “How to Pick a Safe Water Bottle” in Resources, below.

What do YOU use?

So what to do with all those plastic containers in your cupboards?

Do what we do with ours:

• Store crayons and art supplies in them
• Use them to mix paints
• Store screws and nails and other small hardware
• Parts in the garage, etc.
• Put them in recycle if you must discard them

Don’t simply dump them in the landfill.

You can still use them, just don’t store water or food in them.  The goal here is to minimize the amount of time that your food or water spends in plastics, not necessarily eliminate these containers entirely from your life (although that would be OK, too).

We filter our water.  Most of the best stand-alone filtration systems filter the water into a plastic pitcher.  We simply transfer into a ceramic or glass pitcher once filtered.  See my Amazon Store for some nice options.

Next Week:

We’ll focus on reducing the toxins in our food.

It’s easier than you think.

Thanks for visiting, and see you here again next week when we review other ways to minimize poisons in our food.  It’s easier than you think.

I appreciate your comments and questions.  Keep ‘em coming.  Please, “be excellent to one another.”

If you are interested in these topics, please click here to subscribe to this blog (it’s FREE).  Be sure to type in your best email address (the one that you actually use).  You will then receive an email with a “confirmation link” – click on that link to get weekly updates from this blog in your email.

It’s free, it’s convenient, it’s an easy way to stay up-t0-date on information to keep you and your family healthy.

Stay Informed. Stay Healthy.

Best of health and success to you and your families.

Until next time, remember … you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose (unless you’re a boogor doctor :~D)

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Resources:

Credit image of bottles on shore: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4290848934/

This is the 2nd of 4 in the series on this blog. The 1st: http://wp.me/pR4iB-cr

Stainless lunchboxes for your kids: http://www.lunchbots.com

Stainless water bottles: http://www.kleankanteen.com

Poisons in our plastics: http://bit.ly/99ikic Polyethylene terephthalate, high-density polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and others. Great resource.

Wasteful, inefficient:

We churn through 2.5 Million plastic bottles every hour. http://bit.ly/9pBizz

http://bit.ly/axxVJY “Bluewashing” bottled water issue: requires 2 liters of water to produce that 1liter bottle!

Americans spend more $ on bottled water than iPods or movie tickets! http://bit.ly/1gE3fe

Deceptive water marketing:
“Pink Washing the Dangers of Bottled Water” – deceptive marketing. http://bit.ly/92GvM2 by Lisa Kaas Boyle, Plastic Pollution Coalition

http://plasticpollutioncoalition.org/2010/01/pink-washing-the-dangers-of-bottled-water/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-kaas-boyle/pink-washing-the-dangers_b_426077.html

How to pick a safe water bottle:

http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2008/03/17/choosing-a-safe-reusable-water-bottle/

Dangers of bottled water:

Toxins in plastics contribute to allergies, asthma, many studies including this one, 2004: http://bit.ly/cJogf7.

BPA may raise risk of asthma in children: http://bit.ly/9J52OH http://bit.ly/cFbRan

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http://www.ecosalon.com/17-surprising-sources-of-bpa-and-how-to-avoid-them/

http://www.naturalwellbeing.com/blog/2009/07/dangers-of-bottled-water.cfm

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_backlash_against_bottled_water

Scientific American article: Europe bans many chemicals manufactured in the U.S. http://bit.ly/9YwXSp

Environmental impact (Warning – disturbing images):

http://tinyurl.com/ygnzh67

http://bit.ly/czPsQH

http://bit.ly/bhdXdP

http://www.squidoo.com/pacific-garbage-patch

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Tags: air pollution, air quality, allergic rhinitis, asthma, Food, immunity, pediatric sinusitis, plastics, pollutants, pollution, toxins, Water, water pollution