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Monday, March 13th, 2017

Americans now drink more bottled water than soda: What has changed?

Author:     Mengqi Sun
Source:     The Christian Science Monitor
Publication Date:     March 11, 2017
 Link: Americans now drink more bottled water than soda: What has changed?
Stephan:   Here is one of those health stories that has some good news, and some bad news. We'll start with the good news. Americans increasingly are turning to bottled water instead of drinking bubbly caffeine and sugar water. The bad news is that one of the reasons they are doing this is that increasingly Americans do not trust what comes out of their taps to be safe. And of course there remains the issue of all those bottles.

Credit: Rogelio V. Solis/AP

Bottled water surpassed carbonated soft drinks to be the largest beverage category by volume, according to the latest report from market research and consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp. While the new data confirms a decades-long shift in consumption habits from soda to water, largely driven by health concerns, some argue it also suggests a need to improve water infrastructure in the United States.

US bottled water sales grew from 11.8 billion gallons in 2015 to 12.8 billion gallons in 2016, BMC said. While annual per capita consumption of bottled water reached 39.3 gallons, carbonated soft drinks slipped to 38.5 gallons. That’s a dramatic drop from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the average American drank more than 50 gallons of soft drinks per year.

 For Julie Ralston Aoki, director of Healthy Eating and Active Living at the Public Health Law Center in St. Paul, Minn., the trend is driven by health-conscious consumers.

“People want to make a healthier choice,” she tells The Christian Science Monitor in a […]

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2 Comments

  1. skhovland on Monday, March 13, 2017 at 4:17 am

    Maybe, but who knows what’s in bottled water?

    The only way to be sure you have good water is to use a really good drip filter.

    Not to mention the pollution and carbon production caused by making those bottles, filling them, distributing them, and (hopefully) recycling them.

  2. Paul H. Smith on Monday, March 13, 2017 at 8:46 am

    I’ve long suspected that, if not the tipping point, then at least a catalyst towards this eventual dominance of bottled water was Desert Shield/Desert Storm. From 1990 to 1991 I, along with half a million other Americans in a demographic not likely to otherwise have been paying attention to this trend, came to not only depend on, but relish bottled water from Saudi desalinization plants as our primary source of drinking water. For months that’s all we had. When the military finally got its ROPU water disinfecting units set up once we were in Iraq, we despised the heavily chlorinated taste and opted for bottled water whenever we could get them to truck it in. To be sure, bottled water existed before 1990, yet was (relatively) rarely consumed. But the use of bottled water exploded in the 90s, after Desert Storm. I know it wasn’t on my own radar before Desert Storm, but was definitely there afterwards.