A word about the water we drink

Few years ago I learned about the “new waters” that the Coca-cola company and likes started to sell. Since then where ever I go around the world I realize that these multinational corporations are doing their best to monopolize the drinking water market. What they do is buy the local water distributors and replace the water with their brand of water. They usually adopt a local name and write the name of the owner company in really small print. They make it sound like it is a local brand, such as Turkuaz in Turkey. But this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the waters they sell were healthy.

When they first appeared, they had to brand this water as “soft drink” because there was no regulations to brand well water as drinking water. But these companies ‘helped’ each country to change their laws to allow it do be branded as “distilled drinking water”. This is how they get away with it these days.

What is distilled water? When you want to make a soft drink or soda, it usually requires dissolving lots of ingredients in water. Spring water normally contains some minerals and there is a limit to the amount of, say, sugar that can be dissolved in spring water. If you want to put more sugar in it, for example to make cola, you have to take the minerals out of it in order to create that space. You only need H2O. You also do not need spring water. You can drill a well and distill it, which is vaporizing and re-liquefying, and thus taking all the minerals out of it. This way they can dissolve far more sugar in it than they could in spring water.

This process is like taking the light bulb out of its screw and changing it with a different bulb. But what happens if you do not replace the bulb and leave the screw open? The screw wants to unite with a bulb and attracts potential bulbs. In the case of distilled water, the open molecules of H2O attracts minerals to form a stable molecule. Have you ever heard that drinking only rainwater for a long time is depleting? This is what coca-cola water is like. It is to be used in car batteries, not for drinking. When you drink it, it goes into reaction with the minerals in your body. It becomes just like the normal water it once was. And you piss it out and thus loose minerals from your body.

Minerals are necessary for many vital processes in your body. Most importantly they help carry the electrical signals which are necessary for your neural transmissions. In other words, when you are lacking minerals you become less responsive, slower and more stupid. You get tired faster and you get headaches. This is also why we need to change that refined table salt (which consists of two minerals) with sea salt (which has up to forty-seven minerals). It is true that they add some minerals to these water to enhance the taste (although they do not write ingredients on the bottles although these are added ingredients) but still most of the molecules remain open to receive your minerals.

I don’t think this is a conspiracy to make everyone unhealthy. There may be some people who are rubbing their hands thinking of the health supplements they are going to sell to those people who drink this waters but I think it is mostly because of greediness and complete lack of respect to people’s health. We are told that this happens in capitalist societies. Many companies which produce soft drinks or even beer, already have a great supply of this distilled water and because of mass production they can sell it cheaper than spring water. And since we are told that “it’s ok” and we are not forced to drink it, they get away with it. But corporate monopolization is very strong and today there are areas where it is hard to find real water.

One big reason for this is that we didn’t realize or care at first. Nobody told us and since we are not health experts, we couldn’t know. Well, we are responsible for our own health, not the doctors, not “the experts”. We have the choice between real water or distilled water but we are responsible in making our choices wisely because that’s how we let this kind of unhealthy practices spread to people who are not aware. If we don’t make our choice for the spring water, even when it takes more energy to get to it, we let these companies monopolize the market to the point that there will be no more spring water to buy. We may choose not to care for our own health but we have a social responsibility to make our choices wisely because they effect many people. And this choice is ours.