We all know that soda is bad for us. The media is making us quite aware of all the sugar that is in our drinks. We are constantly told to drink more water but is it really all that good for us? The obvious answer is YES, but after a weekend at the beach, I realize the answer is a bit complicated. In a previous post I mentioned to not leave your plastic water bottles inside your cars because the BPA (bis phenyl A) in it will leach into the water when exposed to heat. These BPAs are responsible for causing excess Estrogen in our bodies and may lead to weight gain amongst other things. But now, I have also discovered that many “healthy” waters are in fact very acidic! Drinking water should be at a pH of 7.0 or higher. The higher the number the more basic, or more alkaline, the water is. Our bodies cannot absorb acidic water, which means, after downing bottle are bottle, our bodies remain dehydrated. Many of my clients have increased their water intake to discover that it wasn’t “working” to increase their dehydration status after testing them. My initial thought was that they were eating too many processed foods and their body was still too acidic to absorb the water they needed. But NOW, I realize their is another problem: ACIDIC WATER. Yep. Most waters on the market today are highly acidic. After visiting a shop down in Carlsbad where they had tested the pH of many popular bottled waters, I saw that most waters on the market today scored well below 6.0.
So, Wilma and I decided to do our own test this week. We bought water from Trader Joes, Ralphs, Rite-Aid, and even our local Water & Ice store. We discovered that, indeed, all our waters were about 5.4- 6.0 in range! Yikes! This included Smart water with electrolytes. The only waters that did better were Spring Waters, good ole Arrowhead Water. Interestingly enough, the better (high alkaline) waters didn’t taste as good to me. Well, no surprise, the more alkaline the water, the more minerals and the harder the water. Hmm.. Makes you want to rethink everything we are doing – softening our water, reverse osmosis, ultra purified…. All this in the end makes a commercial tasty water, much like Wonder Bread is a tasty bread – void of all the good stuff.