Just wanted to say that I'm in the central US (Arkansas) and have never consistently drank bottled or filtered water, and have barely drank "city water".. Of my 31 years I've drank virtually unfiltered well water, which probably sends shivers up some spines here, chugging terrifying subterranean water from 380 feet under the ground :>
Never got sick, and of the bottled water I tasted to see if it really tasted any different from tap water (I honestly couldn't tell, but I've got a pretty rough palate), our creepy underground-river water
did taste better to me, but that could be attributed to that dwarfly side of me that enjoyed that our water came from the netherworld
While drinking water from any of those places may not be a good idea, I'd like to add that
breathing the air in some of those big-city areas is probably just as harmful or worse :> I tend to think that, in this new age of products that're manufactured at the lowest cost point possible, and new medicines made every day, and new science and synthetics utilized every day, that perhaps
almost everything is a potential hazard
The tube your toothpaste is in could give you cancer, or teeth bleaching strips, or strange tanning lotions or hair dyes, new nail polish ingredients, new additives in food, new chemicals pumped into the air, new pesticides and germ evolutions, underpaid miserable employees flicking boogers into that fresh vat of tofu..
New new new new new new,
new stuff that hasn't been around for very long, and with so many new sources its a bit difficult to accurately point a finger when a lump shows up on your x-ray :| I walk by a massive rack of urinal cakes every time I visit the local store, a product which is fully and violently known to cause cancer (only to lab rats
in California, thank GOD! I'm not a lab rat and don't live in California!).. Who says that walking by those products every day won't give me cancer
I'll tell you what will give me cancer: the rampant amount of cigarettes I smoke every day
Or the plastic-bottled non-spring-water non-purified Mountain Dew-per-day.. Or the fact that I burn trash outside and often can't avoid breathing the smoke.. Or when my fiancee uses the automated windshield-cleaner sprayer and it mists all through my window onto my skin and into my eyes and lungs :> Or maybe I'll breathe in a wayward fiber from this synthetic "micro-sherpa" blanket here in my room that'll lodge in my lungs.. Or maybe that I've used plastic cups in the microwave, or that I've ate food that, while cooking, melted into a styrofoam plate
I sound pretty off-topic from the subject of what to drink to avoid soda, but I feel I'm pretty dead-on.. Mostly saying that, while tons of choices can and will lengthen your lifespan, there are invisible dangers everywhere anyway, and that death is unavoidable
I've watched health nuts die at 40 years old and I've watched my grandma drink and smoke non-filtered Camel cigarettes every day up to her last day shortly before her 84th birthday..
To answer the posed question, though, I'd drink gently sugared (or honeyed) green tea
And occasionally drink six Monster energy drinks back-to-back, because you
will die someday regardless
And if you want to drink water only, you have to change how you think about water, I'd think.. Call it "dino juice", and realize that some of the
very molocules in the water we drink today was also enjoyed by dinosaurs and cavemen
They
never squirted Mio in their water to flavor it, either!
Or call it corpse-juice, since for every living person there are at least ten dead people whose remains are essentially still here, and most of those deaths involved water
It adds power to it!