Sodium is also a poison. Normal amounts of Nitrogen (the most common element in air), under pressure, will cause you to behave as if you were drunk, and could eventually kill you. Oxygen, in large doses, will kill you. (Want a reference for those last two? Ask any scuba diver, especially one trained in tri-mix, nitrox, or depth-diving.)

Solution? Get rid of it! Let’s see… literally no sodium diet! Oh, look… I’m dead. Huh. Okay, try Oxygen. Whoops, dead again. Nitrogen? Hey, still dead! Still wonder what happens when you stop taking in Fluoride? Here’s a hint: you die (with bad teeth, too).

Every thing, every thing, every thing, in high doses, is bad for you. Money, power, dirt, sleep, food, fluoride, whatever. That doesn’t mean that in normal doses, it is bad for you. In fact, those toxic elements may sometimes actually be, you know, *required* for life.

I have lived in the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco, San Francisco, Kansas, and Los Angeles and each place has different quality tap water. In fact, the suburb I grew up in, Walnut Creek, had two different sources of water and luckily I lived in the part of town that got water from the Sierras, as did San Francisco, rather than the coastal ranges. The difference was amazing, the Sierra water tasted clean and pure, the locally supplied water tasted like an estuary, which is probably where it came from.

The water I had in Kansas would grow black mold if left out over night whereas the water I’ve never seen the water anywhere else I’ve lived ever do that no matter how long it was out. Sometimes the Kansan water would smell and taste like a fish tank and the locals would say it was because “the lake turned over”. Not to mention it came from a river with many other cities and towns upstream for 100s of miles, all dumping their recycled sewage back into it. Yuck.

In Los Angeles, the chlorination levels seem uneven. The water itself does not seem too bad, except for the chlorine which normally is just mildly distasteful, but occasionally it is so strong that when you flush the toilet you get a stonger chlorine smell throughout the bathroom than an indoor heated pool.

Some places I’ve traveled the water comes out of the tap brown and or with sediment in it. And I’ve even had “Montezuma’s Revenge” in California from the water supplied by the City of Carmel.

Alternately, bottled water may be degraded by sitting too long in the bottle, especially if it has sat in the heat or sun in which there will definitely be the taste of plastic.

I much prefer to drink out of glass and why would anyone be drinking out of aluminum? You know, there are links to aluminum and Alzheimers.

I’ve posted on the subject of stainless water bottles. For more info, please visit:

http://soothsayer-says.blogspot.com

That said, I’ve been refilling my bottles with either tap or filtered tap water for years. I usually buy a case a year and use it all year long. By the end of the year, the bottles start looking a bit scruffy (used primarily for travel, not around the house where I’ve been recycling the same blue glass Arizona Iced Tea bottles for 10 years) and I put them in the recycling bin at the curb.

Tip for city water folks: You can remove much of the cholrine by filling a pitcher and letting it sit out open over night. The taste and smell dissipate.

Now, 15 years ago, as a reporter, I covered local and parish government meetings with eye-glazing regularity, and there was always a glass pitcher of ice water and individual glass drinking cups for speakers then. I guess I can understand the need for speakers to have a drink (in the 90s, I sometimes wondered if water was ALL that was in those glasses!), but really…if you’re pitching conservancy to the public, why would you flout that by swigging so conspicuously from your disposable bottle? And this in an area which currently has NO recycling, and a serious problem with landfills. Is it so difficult to rinse a glass? Just my .05 (inflation).

/Rant off

@Rebekah–brava on the trike! I’d love to have one; I can’t ride a bike anymore, either.