Some people (and by that I mean “morons”) have been buying in to a really nifty lie for several years: bottled water is pure and safer than tap water.

I call bullshit.

If you don’t believe me, go check out the episode of Penn & Teller’s show (Bullshit) on this exact subject.

Better yet, check out what happened with The Coca-Cola Company and their new “pure” brand of water, Dasani.

First, let me digress and ask: What the fuck is up with these water brand names. “Dasani” sounds like something an Italian dude would ride down narrow streets with his buddy on the back while checking out chicks. “Crystal Geyser” sounds like a porn movie where some girl pees into the air. “Evian”, as Dennis Miller has pointed out, is “naive” spelled backwards.

Back to my point (or lack thereof), Coca-Cola sold this stuff as “pure bottled water”, but it turned out to be ordinary tap water (the Brits’ supply was originally from the Thames). When caught in that deception, they said “well, it is ultra purified by our special super-secret processes” which subsequently turned out to be reverse-osmosis. That would be the same filtration method used by pretty much every home purifier system.

As if that wasn’t enough, they added a few additional steps like pumping ozone through the water to kill bacteria (my dad’s spa does this) and injecting some inert salts like calcium chloride to modify the “taste profile” of the water. This included small amounts of bromide salts which, because some genius decided to add the bromide salts before the ozone, promptly became bromate salts which just happen to be carcinogens. It turns out that Coke had produced “pure” bottled water with an illegal concentration of them.

Oops.

For the non-chemistry geeks, here is an example:

Sodium chloride is pure “table salt” as most people think of it (though table salt also has sodium iodide in it to help people avoid ugly swollen thyroids and usually some potassium chloride). It is reasonably inert stuff.

Sodium chlorate is used in industrial bleaches, herbicides, and explosives.

Bromides and bromates have similar properties to chlorides and chlorates, bromine and chlorine being related elements.

People pay Coca-Cola (and the rest of these asshats) to bottle tap water and sell it for more per gallon than we pay for the nasty black shit we stick in our cars. At least it can give you cancer just as effectively as gasoline does, ’cause there is not much else in that equation that makes sense.

For the going price of bottled water, those bottles better fucking well dance and sing or suck my dick or something…