Discover Why Using Tap Water to Make Baby Formula For Your Little One is Gambling With Their Health

Using tap water to make baby formula used to be something every mom did without thinking. It was safe, cheap and convenient.

But lately sinister, new things have been happening to our tap water in some centers, and suddenly we need to stop and check what we mix our infant formula with.

Using tap water to make baby formula is certainly convenient and cheap. Young moms are terribly busy, and as they care for their new baby is the last thing they need is to have to go looking for something like a bottle of store bought water to use in the formula. If it is OK during a quiet morning, it is certainly no joke at 1 o’clock in the morning!

But it is an alarming fact that pharmaceutical drugs are now turning up in our tap water, even though the city water authority treats our water supply before sending it to our taps. Traces of prescription drugs, heart pills, asthma medication, hormones, weight loss tablets and many others are regularly found in tap water in major cities and rural areas.

This has happened for two reasons. One, a drug doesn’t get totally absorbed when we swallow it. So significant amounts of it gets flushed down the toilet next time you use the bathroom, and from sewage treatment ponds out into the water catchment areas of our city. In the same way, those half empty packets of old drugs you toss out in the trash leech from municipal landfills into the ground and the water aquifers.

But even though this is so obvious, most city water authorities don’t both to test for pharmaceuticals. In fact in one study of 62 major metropolitan centers almost 40 percent of them said their water regulators did not test for pharmaceuticals. And guess what the same study found? Drugs were picked up in the tap water of 24 of those 62 metropolitan areas.

Do you live in Columbus, Ohio? Your tap water has been found to contain (azithromycin, roxithromycin, tylosin, virginiamycin and caffeine. What about Long Beach or Los Angeles? There, meprobamate and phenytoin are in the drinking water. And the list goes one and on.

Are you using tap water to make baby formula in an unsafe city? There is a very good chance you are. Around 40 million Americans are living in these cities. And rural areas are not better off, because veterinary drugs given to farming livestock run off the land into the rivers and lakes where country people draw water directly, and down into the underground aquifers where home wells draw drinking water.

So the question, should you be using tap water to make baby formula, is well worth considering.

There are three things you can do.

First, do nothing.

Some water authorities are willing to take the risk that traces of pharmaceuticals won’t harm you baby. But several studies have discovered male fish are taking on the characteristics of females when they swim in household water discharged from large cities. So I would say just keeping on using tap water to make baby formula is unsafe.

Two, buy bottled water and mix baby formula with that.

That is especially unsafe, because federal regulations only require bottled water reach the same standard of purity as tap water. And we’ve just seen how unsafe that is!

Third, put a home filter on your tap.

This is a good option because when you filter water at your tap it is cheaper than bottled water, and if you use a carefully chosen filter system it will removed organic contaminants, drugs, and toxic chemicals that pass through your city water treatment plant. You’ll be able to keep using tap water to make baby formula.

In conclusion, have a look around on the Internet for home filter systems that you can put on your tap. One word of caution. Avoid reverse osmosis systems, because they remove the drugs but also get rid of the healthy natural trace minerals found in water that your body must have for health, and also because in the process of delivering you a gallon of clean water they make gallons of dirty waste water. Reverse osmosis systems are unhealthy (and expensive).

If you’d like a place to begin reading about home filter systems you could start at my own web site. There’s helpful information there which families find helpful as they look for ways they can continue using tap water to make baby formula.