Drinking Water: Do you trust your tap?

Photo: bfurnace on Flickr

I’ve been thinking about this lately: Am I alone in my distrust of my municipal drinking water?

My hesitance in guzzling the seemingly harmless water that flows freely from my tap began when my son was born, two and a half years ago. Until then, I didn’t care one way or the other. I drank almost exclusively tap water except for the bottled water I got for free at work (we had a bottled water sponsor at the time) and the bottled water I’d buy if I was out or going camping. That was about the extent of my bottled water use.

When my son was born, however, I began to question the safety of the water I’d taken for granted all my life.

I attended weekly Mom & Baby Drop-In sessions offered by North Shore Coastal Health each week while I was on maternity leave. I pretty much went every week for the year. Not only was it a great place to meet other new moms, but it was a place to get breastfeeding advice, speak to community health nurses about whatever questions I had, and listen to lectures on scheduled topics each week. One of the topics I discussed with the nurses was the safety of water for my newborn.

My son was not exclusively breast fed; he was supplemented with a little formula. Now formula can be purchased as a ready-made liquid or a powder form. The liquid, however, is rediculously expensive as compared with the powder (which isn’t cheap either – a full time formula-fed baby can go through $40/week in formula alone and that’s if they don’t need a specially formulated one i.e. soy-based or whatever). So for those of us who felt EI Mat Leave benefits were a bit of a hit to the pocketbook, we needed to mix powder with water.

Now, the nurses at the drop-in sessions said that babies shouldn’t have tap water until they’re at least 4 months old and their immune systems can handle it. Now I can’t quote exactly who said that and when, but that’s what I was told at the time. That didn’t really make me feel better about using it beyond 4 months either, to be honest. I mean, my kid’s immune system is nearly the same at 3 1/2 months as it is at 4 1/2 months, surely.

I decided to use bottled water at that point because it just seems cleaner (though the Mayo Clinic says you should also consider boiling bottled water before giving it to a baby) . I mean, my pipes in my building are 35 years old and my municipality’s pipes are probably nearly 100 years old. They can’t be all that clean inside, can they? I’ve caught glimpses of the water mains when you drive by a hole in the middle of the road where the crews are digging and those giant mains have buildup in them… just like mineral deposits in the inside of caves. The problem is I don’t really know what made those deposits. Plus, there are reports of stuff in our water I don’t particularly want there. For instance, in March of this year, CNN reported finding prescription drugs in tap water across the US. That’s kind of scary.

So anyway, I am a bottled water advocate. Does that mean I won’t touch tap water? Of course not. But I buy bottled water for regular use at home and don’t feel quite right about giving the tap water to my kid. What does that say?

What do you think? Do you trust your local tap water? Is it municipal or well? Do you drink bottled water? Am I being crazy about this?

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