Whole Foods' bottled water has "concerning levels of arsenic," says Consumer Reports

If you really need to pick nits, ok, they should have said:

"this water has from 3 to N times the level of every other brand tested, where N is any arbitrarily large number"

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Well, it used to.

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Could always just burn H2 and O2 gasses. Gonna be hard to As contaminate that.

From the company web site: “When you take a sip, you’re enjoying water that fell as rain or snow in the surrounding mountains more than 11,000 years ago. From there it slowly made its way into the earth, penetrating the Imnaha Basalt-a volcanic formation more than 2.5 million years old. There the water stayed, 2.2 miles down, gently working its way through the rock around it. Over thousands of years, heat and pressure forced it back up through cracks and fissures in the basalt, Untouched by surface contamination, Starkey Spring Water emerges in our Spring House pure, lightly mineralized and silky smooth.”

Too bad that it met some arsenic along the way…

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You’re not giving 6x1023 credit for what an enormous number it is. If you made water by burning hydrogen, it would be riddled with atoms of arsenic (and most other elements) from the gas nozzles, the container, the air supply etc.; to have a drop of water with zero arsenic atoms would be like removing every single particle of dust from a whole museum.

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Are you just going to gloss right over the fact that it is “silky smooth?” :roll_eyes:

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Yup. Try selling that line in Flint.

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Sun’s coming up.
Like a big bald head.
Poking up over the grocery store.
It’s Starkey’s day.
It’s Starkey’s day today.

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Other than emergencies and other similar exigencies, paying for water is the biggest grift there is. Made worse by the environmental damages of packing, transport, etc…

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I thought pedantry was going out of style.

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Even if you could, I wouldn’t want to drink it. Drinking COMPLETELY deionized water can lead to hyponatremia. I’ve had that a few times, it wasn’t fun.

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I’ve said it before.

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Two miles deep? Isn’t that where they pump the fracking waste?

gawd bless you for that!
Paging Mister Stakey, white courtesy telephone, please

edit: typo

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FWIW, Chicago has incredible tap water. Super tasty. Some of the best in the country, and really low in contaminants. It is piped in from Lake Michigan from these miles-off mysterious artificial round brick islands in the lake. (really, look it up on google maps)

You have to do some digging to understand the paradox, but fish taken from the same waters have fairly strict warnings on consumption due to pollution.

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Also because the city reversed the direction of the chicago river to reduce the inflow of industrial waste into their water supply. That was after continually extending the pipes farther and farther from shore stopped working.

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I used to do a lot of traveling for my job. Chicago is why I bought a Brita charcoal filtered water bottle to keep in my luggage to use at the hotel.
“Tasty” I guess is technically a pretty accurate way to describe it. You definitely can taste it, and it leaves no doubt about where it came from.

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So, Trump was able to unload all of that diluted vodka he once put his face on.

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Not really, though.

The arsenic standard, like many drinking water standards, is set, in part, by how difficult and expensive – how practical – it is to remove it rather than aiming for perfect safety.

…which is true of many drinking-water standards, but even so, arsenic is a special case. Most water standards are set, if not under, than at least close to, the “Public Health Goals.” The PHGs are the level below which, health experts agree, no harm is expected. Above the PHG, some harm is possible.

Most standards that exceed PHGs only do so by 50-100% or so.

Arsenic standards, though, are set several orders of magnitude higher than arsenic PHGs.

Here in CA, f’rex, the state PHG for arsenic is 0.004 ppb, while the level permitted in drinking water (tap or bottled) is 10 ppb.

Arsenic is a natural mineral contaminant. Whether your water supply contains` noticeable amounts is purely ‘luck of the draw.’ Watersheds and riverbeds and aquifers and reservoirs and canals may or may not have arsenate minerals; if they do, their water will contain them.

Removing arsenic is damnably expensive, since it’s just simple mineral salts. For most tap water uses - flushing, washing, watering landscaping, commercial process, etc. – a bit of arsenic is irrelevant.

The R/O filtration chains that turn tap water into Dasani or Aquafina (or Coca-cola and Sprite, for that matter) will remove virtually all arsenic.

But that’s expensive – imagine paying Dasani prices for your tap water.

But at even at half the permitted levels, arsenic can still cause serious problems for developing neural systems - children and infants and pregnant women should NOT use a primary drinking-water source with 9 (or even 5 or 4) ppb, as that is known to produce frank and obvious neural deficits.

Lower amounts produce more subtle effects - increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, etc – in the entire population.

The oft-repeated claim that tap (or bottled) water is “perfectly safe” if it passes federal/state drinking-water standards has a huge hole in it if your water contains arsenic.

(Some other standards are also arguably problematic, especially for vulnerable populations, but none of those others so vastly and egregiously exceed genuinely safe (PHG or less) levels.)

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This argument is starting to remind me of Usenet circa 1991 circa September 1993.

edit: had to fix the date

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Arsenic
I don’t want water that’ll make me sick
Then again I like that little kick
That I get
From arsenic

(ETA…)
Their food you see
Every bit is grown organically
And their water is all filter-free
The arsenic
Came naturally

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