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The discovery of salmonella in the Alamosa, Colo., water system in March could drive anyone to buy bottled water. Some 300 poisoning cases were reported, schools and restaurants were closed, and the National Guard handed out 8,000 gallons of bottled water a day.
Such incidences can only boost the already healthy bottled water business, in which sales have increased 50 percent in the past five years. A Simmons National Consumer Survey reveals a trend within the trend: 43 percent of respondents said they drank “enhanced” bottled water.
Enhanced waters run the gamut from flavored waters to those with vitamins, minerals, electrolytes, and oxygen to provide antioxidants, energy, and many other purported benefits. But do the claims hold water?
Electrolyte Waters
As the story goes, the University of Florida football team began winning games in 1965 after four university researchers formulated a carbohydrate-electrolyte beverage, later marketed to the general public as Gatorade. In 1988, Gatorade established the Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Barrington, Ill., to expand knowledge on sports nutrition and find ways to enhance athletic performance. The result has been not only a dizzying array of research articles (www.gssiweb.com), but also the expansion of the Gatorade line and introduction of Propel Fitness Water.
According to Gatorade, studies show that active people consume only about half of the fluids they lose during a workout when they drink plain water due to its lack of taste, but will drink more flavored water. However, Deborah Enos, a nutritionist and author of Weight a Minute!, warns against such imbibing in highly concentrated beverages that your body mistakes for a meal.
“Your body needs to divert blood from your working muscles to your gut so you can digest it,” Enos says. “Many people end up with stomach cramps and their legs are exhausted, and they end of stopping their workout.” If you’re working out for 20 to 45 minutes, stick with plain water, she advises. If you’re working out longer or are jogging on a summer day when the temperature reaches 100 degrees, you will need to replace electrolytes, but Enos suggests diluting a drink such as Gatorade with water in equal proportions. “Post workout,” she notes, “you are going to need to have something to refuel anyway, and you are actually better off with food. If you eat a little carb and protein within 30 to 45 minutes after a workout, you will store more energy for the next day’s workout.”
Gatorade’s electrolyte-enhanced water includes sodium, potassium, and chloride. Its Endurance version — marketed for “elite” and endurance athletes — includes a greater abundance of electrolytes, as well as calcium and magnesium. The flavoring is artificial and sometimes stabilized with brominated vegetable oil (bromine is the stuff put in fire retardant and anti-knock motor oil) — though Gatorade claims the BVO level is minimal.
Glacéau (owned by the Coca-Cola Co.) makes electrolyte-enhanced, vapor-distilled SmartWater with no calories and no flavoring. In addition to water, it contains calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, and potassium bicarbonate. Like the Gatorade company, Coca-Cola founded its own scientific facility in Atlanta, Ga.: The Beverage Institute for Health & Wellness, whose mission includes research, education, and outreach. The institute’s Web site (www.beverageinstitute.org) includes a tools-and-resources section that features a hydration calculator and beverage ingredient glossary.
Enos recommends making your own electrolyte-restoring drink with orange or apricot juice in a formula of 20 percent juice to 80 percent water.
One problem, she notes, is that many people go to the gym first thing in the morning. “Most of us are already dehydrated when we wake up; that’s why our mouths are dry,” she says. Dehydration triggers the heart to beat an extra beat (called a T-wave) because it has to work harder to pump thick blood. Enos recommends consuming 100 calories of easily digested food and 8 ounces of water prior to working out. But, she says, “It’s the rare person who is electrolyte-depleted when they get up.”
Gatorade (a division of PepsiCo.) claims 50 percent of exercisers begin their workouts less than fully hydrated and markets Gatorade A.M. to those who exercise in the morning. It has no caffeine, but does have 14 grams of sugar and 14 grams of carbohydrates per 8-ounce serving.
Vitamin Waters
Shopping for water more and more resembles shopping for toothpaste: Do you want to fight cavities, gingivitis, plaque, or tartar? Do you want to strengthen your tooth enamel, freshen your breath, or whiten your smile? Of course if a brand offered one formula that did it all (heaven forbid one should want all the aforementioned benefits), it would lose valuable real estate on store shelves.
Similarly, vitamin-fortified waters come in a spectrum of flavors and formulas targeted to specific needs/desires. Glacéau makes 15 varieties of VitaminWater — designating its kiwi-strawberry water for “focus,” cranberry-grapefruit for “balance,” raspberry-apple for “defense,” peach-mango for “endurance,” and so on. Apparently, if you want a sharp mind and defense against free radicals, et al., you have to buy (and drink) a lot of VitaminWater.
Unfortunately, people drinking the top-selling water for its health benefits often are unaware that their drink of choice is not as healthy as they think. Glacéau packs theirs with almost the same high level of sugar and calories (32.5 grams and 125 calories per 20-ounce bottle) as a 12-ounce can of its parent company’s signature Coke (39 grams and 140 calories). Coca-Cola rival Pepsi offers SoBe Life Water with the same sugar and calorie counts.
People who do read the label on a bottle of VitaminWater may overlook the fact that it contains 2.5 servings. “I don’t know any person who is going to drink a third of that bottle,” Enos says. The full bottle contains the equivalent of 8 teaspoons of sugar. “The average person, 5 to 6 feet tall, can have 18 teaspoons of sugar a day, and your body can effectively process it. When you’re drinking these vitamin waters, the sugar is so concentrated that it blows your blood sugar off the charts,” Enos says.
“Your body can focus on a lot of things, but one thing your body does not like is high levels of sugar,” she continues. “When your body is making insulin, it says, ‘OK, I will get to the vitamins later.’” Additionally, she notes, “You may be giving yourself a false sense of security: ‘I don’t need to eat any fruit today.’” And food is the best source of vitamins.
“When you have food, there’s fiber and fat, so it sits in the body and gives the body an opportunity to break it down,” says Enos, noting that a lot of vitamins and minerals are absorbed in the colon.
The redeeming quality of vitamin waters is that they are better than soda. And if someone is going to drink their vitamins, she recommends B and C vitamins. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble, meaning they need to be dissolved in food to enter the bloodstream, so the body will not benefit from their addition to water unless it accompanies food.
Similarly, calcium is best absorbed in conjunction with magnesium. Gatorade claims its Propel Calcium — which also is enhanced with B, C, and E vitamins — contains the same calcium content as an 8-ounce glass of milk. So to get complementary magnesium, it would be more beneficial consumed with nuts or seeds, especially on a green salad. Propel contains only 6 grams of sugar and 30 calories per 24-ounce bottle.
Premium Bottled Waters
Consumers should know that approximately 40 percent of bottled waters (including Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani) are merely purified tap water. Michael Mascha, a premium bottled water expert and author of Fine Waters, champions — primarily for taste and mouthfeel — premium bottled waters that come from virginal sources such as artesian aquifers, mineral springs, glaciers, icebergs, and even rain in pristine areas captured before it hits the ground. He notes that premium bottled waters are more popular in Europe.
“In America, water is enjoyed for hydration. In Europe, water is enjoyed for hydration plus for minerals and trace elements,” Mascha says. “In the United States, people drink low mineral content water and then they pop mineral supplement pills, whereas in Europe, they enjoy high mineral content water and don’t take supplements.”
In particular, he notes, studies have shown that magnesium deficiencies have been linked to heart disease. Water treatments such as reverse osmosis not only remove undesirable impurities, but also remove magnesium from water. Spring and artesian waters contain magnesium leached from their lengthy contact with geological formations.
There is debate surrounding how much good drinking mineral water will do a body, however. And in the United States, bottlers are not allowed to claim health benefits. Nutritionists say food is your best source for minerals.
Bottle or Tap?
When the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental group tested more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of water, it found that a third contained “significant contamination.” Almost a quarter of the brands violated strict California limits for arsenic or certain cancer-causing compounds. It also found in the water chemicals used in making plastic.
Municipal water officials are quick to point out that FDA standards for bottled water are less strict than EPA standards for tap water; that FDA standards do not apply to water packaged and sold within the same state or to carbonated water; and that government-certified lab testing is not required for bottlers, as it is for cities. Additionally, every community water system is required by federal law to provide customers with an annual water quality report by July 1 of each year. For more information, visit http://www.epa.gov/safewater
The California Department of Health Services advises households that may be more vulnerable to contaminants in drinking water — including households with cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, people who have undergone organ transplants, people with HIV/AIDS or other immune-system disorders, some elderly, and infants — to seek advice about drinking water from their healthcare providers.
Oxygenated/Magnetized Water
Bottlers promoting waters with high levels of oxygen (one injects 200mg of oxygen into a liter) claim their products improve circulation, optimize physical efficiency, reduce muscle strain and stiffness, accelerate healing and regeneration, promote fat burning, slow aging, activate and support the immune system, improve concentration and memory, and provide a calming effect.
“Oxygen in water is really good for you if you’re a trout or salmon and you are breathing with your gills,” Mascha says. “But if you put oxygen into your stomach, it just gets upset, because we are not absorbing oxygen with our guts.”
If you want the benefits espoused by oxygenated water makers, maybe you should just take a deep breath.
As for magnetized water, Stephen Lowe, a retired chemist in Vancouver who maintains the AquaScams Web site, calls such claims not just “flapdoodle” but “nonsensical flapdoodle.”
“Molecules that possess an odd number of electrons can be temporarily aligned by an applied magnetic field,” Lowe says. “Water, H2O, contains 10 electrons, so it is not attracted to or oriented by a magnet.”
If you doubt this, the next time you spill water, try picking it up with a magnet.
Those concerned about the water coming out of their taps can buy whole-house (point-of-entry) filtration or distillation systems or even filters just for their kitchen sinks.
And those who buy bottled water can read the labels the same way they read labels on other packaged consumables.
Relief for Water Worriers
Alarming reports of pharmaceutical contamination lead local agency to participate in a study — with favorable results
Although water agencies must test their water at specified intervals (i.e., weekly for bacteria), there are no monitoring requirements for pharmaceuticals in water. The Coachella Valley Water District volunteered — in fact, paid $10,000 — to participate in a national research project specifically designed to test for pharmaceuticals.
“We wanted to be proactive,” explains Steve Bigley, environmental services manager, referring to the “emerging issue” widely reported in the media earlier this year. “The whole reason was not to just run a bunch of tests,” he says, but, more importantly, “to look at what it means … what level would be a level of concern.
“The regulating agencies have not done the work yet," Bigley says. “It takes years to go through that process. We need to know what it means.”
In 2006, CVWD submitted samples from two well sites: one at Victoria Falls in Rancho Mirage and one at Palm Desert Country Club in Palm Desert. The American Water Works Association Research Foundation is expected to release its findings this summer. While the participants will remain anonymous in the formal report, the foundation provided individual results to participating water agencies at their urging following media reports. CVWD has included that information in its just-released annual water quality report.
What the report shows is that none of the 63 compounds under evaluation were detected in the Victoria Falls well and that amounts of three of the 63 compounds detected in the Palm Desert Country Club well were far below a level that would indicate a health risk.
Researchers calculated the acceptable daily intake level using the same methods used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Depending on the compound, “[a] person would have to drink 9,000 to 18 million liters of water each day from [the well] over a lifetime to drink a level that might cause EPA to be concerned about possible health effects,” Bigley says. “One would have to drink an even more impossibly large amount of water from this well each day to get a dose that a doctor might prescribe for a medical condition.” The three compounds — an antibiotic and two antiseizure drugs — were detected in levels of 1.2 to 2.6 nanograms per liter, or one part per trillion.
“We think this is good information,” Bigley says. “This shows we don’t have a problem.”
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