Have you ever stopped to think what precisely is in a glass of water? Besides water, that is! Here, BIBO reveals how there could be a few ingredients you hadn’t counted on…
There’s a lot more to water than just water. It may be clear, colourless and tasteless, but that doesn’t mean it’s nothing but hydrogen and oxygen molecules intertwining happily.
Here, BIBO takes a deep dive into what you’ve been pouring down your throat all these years, and finds some easy ways to make sure your refreshing tipple is the purest there is.
Chemical cocktail
At least 50 different contaminates are added to Australian tap water! But before you spit out the mouthful you’ve just taken, there’s no need to panic as most are designed to make it safe to drink.
Chlorine, for example, reduces the number of bacteria, fluoride protects our teeth from decay and aluminium helps remove unwanted substances. All are completely harmless.
The only problem with chlorine is that it can give the water an unpleasant taste. The best way to filter it out is with a BIBO² water bar – and there’s no need to worry about the bacteria it's supposed to kill as they're removed as well!
You'll be amazed at how much better your water tastes too!
A bug’s life
We breathe in more bugs from tap water than we do from our toilets, according to a study by the University of California. Their researchers found that only 0.4 per cent of airborne bacteria originate from the toilet bowl while nine per cent are from tap water.
The vast majority won't cause us any issues, but, if you do want to make sure the drinking water in your house doesn’t contain any unsavoury critters, it’s super easy to have it purified and filtered.
Lumps of plastic
Remember when exfoliating shower gels used tiny plastic balls to gently remove dead skin cells that then flowed harmlessly down the plughole in the shower? Well, millions of marine animals might question just how harmless they were as the pesky things lodged in their guts and slowly killed them.
These days, we’re the ones eating plastic – albeit microscopic pieces.
A study in the UK this month estimated that we could all be ingesting 7000 pieces a day!
Meanwhile Australian researchers revealed in 2020 that we each consume the equivalent of a credit card in plastic every week! It comes from carpets, bed linen, toys, food packages…and plastic bottles.
As 93 per cent of water bottles contain microplastics that have seeped from the bottle into the liquid, experts now recommend filtering it before drinking it.
Or, better still, don’t buy it!
DID YOU KNOW:
Australians splash out over $2 billion a year on bottled water, many wrongly thinking it’s better for them.
If you’re particularly gullible, you can purchase BLVD natural spring water, sourced from 20 metres below Tasmania, for a mere US$180 for nine bottles! At least the bottles are glass, but we recommend tap water (which costs less than one cent per litre) and buying a nice reusable glass bottle to carry it around.
Mineral-less mineral water
When bottled water is called ‘mineral water’ it makes it sound like it must be healthy. After all, we all need minerals. But numerous scientific reports have concluded that it has no health benefits, and can even have less magnesium, potassium and calcium than tap water.
And some contain higher levels of potentially harmful substances such as chlorine, nitrate and bisphenol A, a chemical released from plastic.
Oh, and in case you’ve forgotten, plastic bottles are an environmental catastrophe. The energy used to manufacture one plastic bottle is the equivalent of filling it a quarter full with oil.
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It's not un-leaded
Half of tap water in NSW contains lead, researchers at Macquarie University found, mainly due to old taps and pipes. One in 12 samples they took had levels above the maximum permitted, which could be very dangerous for young children.
The filtration system on a BIBO² includes a multistage carbon filter that removes any lead that may be lurking in the water.
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