When making baby formula, many parents would use tap water without thinking. It is considered as convenient, cheap and safe. However, we should check the kind of water we use to mix with the baby formula. Tap water is certainly cheap and convenient, especially because young parents are often terribly busy. The last thing they want is additional detail that they need to manage. But, it is actually an alarming fact that more and more chemicals are being used to make tap water “suitable” for consumption. Before sending the water to our taps, the city water authority performs a number of treatment procedures. Not only the tap water contains water treatment chemicals, there are actually traces of weight loss tablets, hormones, asthma medication, heart pills and other prescription drugs.
This could happen because our tap water is actually recycled. Although this may sound rather disgusting, but the water we flush down the toilet could be recycled and makes its way to our drinking glass. Some of the drug we take will be expelled through our urine and those half-empty drug packets we threw in the garbage can be absorbed by the soil in the municipal landfills and accumulate in the water aquifers. Unfortunately, city water authority typically test treated water for micro-organisms, heavy metals and other chemicals. Pharmaceutical drugs can be more difficult to detect and they would require different kind of instruments. Our tap water could contain many kinds of drugs, such as phenytoin, meprobamate, caffeine, virginiamycin, tylosin, roxithromycin and azithromycin. In fact, the list could go on and on.
We should really make sure that we use safe water when making baby formula in a crowded city with centralized water supply. Billions of people are living in cities with managed water supply and it should be noted that rural areas aren’t better off. Veterinary drugs and in some cases, pesticides could reach rivers, lakes and underground water supply. In some cases, the underground aquifers have been contaminated and they are the places where wells draw water for consumption. Tap water is safe only if the local authority is willing to take action to detect traces of pharmaceutical drugs that could harm people. In this case, it may not be safe to use tap water for our baby. It should be safer to use bottled water when making baby formula. However, it should be noted that some countries only require bottled water to have at least the same quality with potable tap water.
If it is really unsafe to use tap water or bottled water, it is a good idea to choose reliable home filter on our tap. This should be a financially sound option because the money we spend to buy bottled water for one year could be much higher than a decent set of filters. We should choose high quality filters that can remove toxic chemicals, drugs and organic contaminants. As an example, it would be better to choose reverse osmosis system, because only water molecules that can get through the system.