It's true. The chemicals in tap water increase your cancer risk, but drinking only bottled is not a solution. Depending on the brand, you may as well drink tap water In fact, sometimes tap-water is the safer option.
The safest option of all is to buy a home purifier. The technology available for your home is a vast improvement over the purification methods used by public treatment facilities or bottling companies, mostly, because you are treating "less" water.
In order to completely remove all of the known chemicals in tap water your public provider would have to reduce the flow to a trickle. It would be impossible for them to service all of the homes in your community, at the same time.
Bottling companies could not meet their production quotas and provide the safest beverages. For large scale operations, the purification method of choice (if you can call it that) is reverse osmosis. But, if you drink tap water that has been run through a reverse osmosis system, you are still drinking chemical contaminants. Reverse osmosis does not remove them.
When you buy a brand like Dasani, Aquafina or Pure-Life, you are about to drink tap water that has been run through a reverse osmosis system. Those companies, as well as 25% of the other bottlers, use publicly treated sources and further reduce contaminants through the use of reverse osmosis.
But, as I mentioned reverse osmosis does nothing about the chemicals in tap water It was never designed to. It was originally designed for de-mineralization.
Many industries need to reduce the content of naturally occurring minerals, like calcium, in order to prevent excessive corrosion of machinery, to reduce the water's ability to carry an electric charge or for other reasons. Naturally occurring minerals do not corrode our internal workings. In fact, we need them for good health.
There are many environmental concerns revolving around all of those bottles of water that people are drinking every day. There's the overuse of natural resources (water, electricity and oil). There's the added pollution from those plastic bottles, 75% of which end up in a landfill. But, there are individual economic and safety considerations, as well.
If you drink tap water that has been run through a selective home filtration device that includes carbon, a multi-media block with a sub-micron porous structure and ion exchange, more than 99% of all the common chemical contaminants, as well as the traces of metals, prescription drugs and parasitic cysts will be removed. But, naturally occurring minerals are allowed to "pass" through. The system even enhances the mineral content, to a certain degree.
The chemicals in tap water increase your cancer risk, but those same chemicals are present in the majority of bottled brands. Environmentalists would like you to drink tap water more often. You can save thousands of dollars per year by installing a home purification system to remove the chemicals in tap water instead of buying bottled. If you're not convinced, there are more reasons, so, keep learning.
Dominic Anderton is a dedicated researcher on the health benefits of purified drinking and bath water. Visit his site now at http://www.pure-and-safe-water.com to get the facts on how to choose the best water purification system.