It has never been easier to drink water. It positively gurgles all around us. Legions of bottles stand to attention in sparkly ranks beside those upmarket takeaway sarnies. Bubbly blue water coolers are popping up in workplace corridors and jumping out at you, like Daleks. In meetings, where once the only hope was canteen tea or coffee and a ginger snap, stylish bottled water is de rigueur - in corporate land, the fancier the better (from an obscure foreign source that no one's heard of, or bottled in coloured glass, perhaps), and if you can have it specially bottled under your company logo, you'll impress clients with your finger-on-the-pulse modernity. Today's teenagers actually like to be seen carrying around a bottle of water, even if they have never taken ecstasy in their lives, because water is cool. For even the most basic corner shop or petrol station, water has become as essential an item of stock as chewing gum. In restaurants, the question is not so much whether you want water as whether it will be still or sparkling. Water is even beginning to trickle into schools, once bastions of dehydration. And if you're stocking up for a party, water has become indispensable kit. Not just for the drivers, either. Everyone expects it.
The bottled water market, which bubbled away perkily throughout the 1990s with double-digit annual growth, has become a powerful geyser of Icelandic proportions in the new century. "Hydration" is very definitely the new consumer message marketing people are working to get across. Last year, our total consumption of bottled water was worth £1bn. While sales of colas stagnate, water gushes - it is currently the fastest growing soft drink. There's a stack of money to be made from selling this liquid that falls for free from the sky - a bottle of Aqua-Pura, for example, bears the consumer-focused slogans "hydrating British athletes" and "pura mind/ pura body". Turn to its advert in the trade press and it drops in an extra thought: "Pura profit."
In the past few weeks, the word even came out from the US that it is possible to drink too much water. USA Track & Field - the governing body for athletes - advised runners not to drink copious amounts of water during races: it could reduce mineral levels in the body, resulting in dizziness, respiratory problems and seizures. The British Natural Mineral Water Information Service was quick to respond. Research shows, it points out, that in the UK, most people suffer from drinking too little, not too much. Which is odd, given the wave of water that appears to be engulfing us.
For, despite the huge increase in UK sales of bottled water over the past decade, water consumption figures indicate that we are a chronically desiccated nation. The disparity between what we drink and what we need is staggering. Latest figures from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey show that the average adult drinks in one week the amount of water nutritionists recommend for one day: eight glasses. Children and teenagers drink even less, just four glasses a week. Last year, research carried out by the pollsters ICM, for the Natural Mineral Water Information Service, found that only 10% of us drink as much water as health experts recommend.
And yet we are, quite literally, what we drink. Our bodies are at least two-thirds water. The brain is 85% water. All our biochemical and physiological processes go on in a watery medium, and without adequate water we struggle to function. Deprived of food, we could get by for several days before obvious illness set in. Deprived of water, we become debilitated within hours. We're not just courting heartburn, headaches, mental dullness, tiredness or constipation, it seems, but an altogether more scary catalogue of illness. The association between kidney problems and low fluid intake is well established. Research also shows links with certain cancers, diabetes and heart disease. Dehydration may be a contributory factor in asthma, high blood pressure, back pain, migraine and colitis.
Even if we don't get ill, like neglected plants trying to draw nutrients from an impossibly arid soil, we will almost certainly droop. Brain research has shown that a 2% loss in body fluids can cause a 20% reduction in body performance, both physical and mental. A mildly dehydrated driver, for example, will be less alert than a hydrated one and less able to make critical split-second decisions behind the wheel. Confused elderly patients admitted to hospital are commonly dehydrated. Experiments among schoolchildren suggest that water increases the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the brain, improving concentration and intellectual performance. Put simply, when encouraged to drink water, pupils get better results.
A broad medical consensus subscribes to the modern gospel that "More Water Is Good For You" but, despite increased availability, large sections of the population do not appear to be listening. Conduct a quick survey of those around you, and you may be astonished to discover how beings sharing the same basic physiology can have such diverse needs. You'll find a few people who feel thirsty often, drink lots of water, and who can't imagine getting by without it. But there are many more hardline water refuseniks, who may take the odd cup of tea or coffee, but almost never seem to get thirsty.
"I've seen people who are actually clinically dehydrated, but they don't feel thirsty," says nutritionist Dr John Briffa. "They have a blunted thirst response. There is some evidence that the body has a self-protection mechanism. If you reduce fluid to it, it will conserve water more efficiently. Some people genuinely do not seem to have the same apparent need for water as others. But there's no doubt that if they did drink more, they would benefit."
Leaving aside the "never thirsty" and "always thirsty", there's a huge middle ground of people who feel vaguely fretful about not drinking enough. They may put down to a lack of water that occasional groggy headache, and make a mental note to drink more, but they just can't seem to get around to it. That's largely because confusion is rampant. It starts with the recommended amount of water you need to drink in a day, the stock answer being 30ml of water a day to each kilogram of body weight. On average, it's estimated that the human body loses one and a half litres of water a day. Although we get water from food - especially fruit and vegetables, which are 90% water - most nutritionists recommend that, as a rule of thumb, if we are not to become dehydrated, we need to drink at least an extra one, and preferably two, litres of water daily.
It also depends on who you are and what you do, however. A person who sits at a desk all day in a humid environment won't need as much water as a labourer laying the surface on a hot road in summer. Children are particularly prone to dehydration, because they have a greater surface area to volume ratio than adults, which means that they gain more heat through the skin. In hot weather, it is thought that our need for water is easily doubled.
Such variations have led health experts to advocate checking urine colour, rather than recommending a fixed amount of water. Pee, you see, is now considered to be the most reliable test of your current state of hydration - pale and watery, with a vague lemon tinge, is what you're after. Any tendency towards yellow or, worse, ochre, and you've got some serious water drinking to do.
The water becomes muddied when you consider other drinks that might contribute towards that extra one to two litres a day. Among independent and public health nutritionists, there is general agreement that you cannot count the water in drinks containing caffeine (such as tea, coffee and colas) or in alcohol (with the possible exception of low-alcohol beer), since they will propel you to the loo to pee and hence exacerbate dehydration. Others disagree. "I don't think the amount of caffeine in tea and coffee amounts to a particularly serious diuretic effect, although it will vary from person to person," says Richard Laming of the British Soft Drinks Association.
Drinks manufacturers are ever so slightly torn in their attitude to water. Several bottled water brands are owned by parent companies with other interests to consider. Nestlé, for example, owns Perrier, Buxton and Vittel. Clearly, then, it wants to promote water - but not at the expense of coffee. Manufacturers of soft drinks can boost sales of profitable squashes, lemonades, iced teas and colas by arguing that they contain water. The typical sweetness and synthetic chemical composition of such drinks, however, has most nutritionists throwing up their hands in horror. Their verdict is that herb or fruit teas and unsweetened fruit juice can count towards that recommended extra one to two litres of water a day, but nothing else.
Even once you're out of the minefield of exactly how much water to drink, you then get into the difficult territory of what sort of water to drink. Lots of people consider tap water undrinkable. It's common to hear people, especially children, saying that they can't take plain water unless it's disguised with something to flavour it, such as diluting squash. This is, in part, a reflection of how our tastebuds have been perverted by the copious amounts of sugar in popular soft drinks. But in some places tap water does objectively taste pretty bad. The filmy, slightly viscous residue that coats the sides of a London mug once tea or coffee has been drunk makes you wonder about the wholesomeness of the water that flows out of the tap. In most other areas, it tastes better, but almost anywhere in the UK, if you pour a hot bath and lean over it as it fills, your nose will pick up the bleachy scent of chlorine, something not always immediately obvious in a glass of the same water served cold.
The proud boast of the UK's Drinking Water Inspectorate is that tap water is "good enough to bottle". Last year, only 0.14% of samples of tap water failed to meet government safety monitoring standards. That sounds reassuring - but when things go wrong with tap water, they do so with a vengeance. Last summer, for example, some 150,000 water consumers in the Glasgow and Clydebank area were warned by public health authorities to boil their water after the parasite cryptosporidium was confirmed in their water supply. This bug is rarely fatal but can cause severe abdominal pains, vomiting and diarrhoea. Calls flowed into the emergency hotline. The official explanation was that water workers mistook a valve for a water meter.
The most infamous water contamination incident in recent years took place at South West Water's Lowermoor treatment works at Camelford in 1988, when a lorryload of aluminium sulphate got into the wrong tank, polluting supplies to the surrounding area. Residents are still campaigning for recognition that their health has been adversely affected as a result.
Such incidents are relatively few and far between. Almost all tap water is officially clean and safe - but only because it has been processed. Tap water is surface water from rivers and lochs that has been stored in reservoirs, pumped through filter beds to remove fine particles, then treated to destroy harmful bacteria. Everything that goes down the lavatory or plughole - human waste, household chemicals from soaps, toothpaste, shampoos and disinfectants - is piped to sewage works for treatment. But it can then be discharged into the rivers that feed our drinking water supply. The more densely populated the area you live in, the more likely it is that a proportion of your drinking water has been through somebody's kidneys - hence the old joke that Londoners' water has been recycled several times.
Tap water is also vulnerable to pollution from industrial and agricultural waste, such as pesticides, nitrates and solvents. You would love to think that the water that flows from the tap is as fresh as the proverbial mountain stream, but a chemical soup might be a more apt analogy. The chlorine routinely added to stop bacterial contamination, as well as giving some people post-shower itchy skin, can react with organic matter in water to produce compounds called trihalomethanes, which are known carcinogens. Aluminium, which has clear links to Alzheimer's disease and senile dementia, is used to clear cloudy water. Residues from the contraceptive pill discharged in urine can find their way into tap water. Effluent from contraceptives may be a factor in falling sperm counts. Certain regions habitually treat water with the controversial chemical fluoride, as a paternalistic public health measure to prevent tooth decay - indeed, the government last month announced legislation to make it easier for health authorities to do so, despite evidence of possible adverse effects, including tooth discoloration, bone cancer and osteoporosis.
The very thought of this catalogue is enough to send the health-conscious flocking into the arms of bottled water barons, even though that means paying up to 1,000 times more for the privilege. (Tap water may not taste too good, or be that "natural" by the time we drink it, but it does have the virtue of being cheap.) Though there is now a thriving industry supplying the restaurant and water-cooler markets with what is now known as "table water" (in other words, just plain tap water that has been further filtered and purified), most bottled water is either mineral or spring water. These are "ground waters" that started out as rain, which seeped through rocks and collected in underground pools, the sort of water sought so desperately by Marcel Pagnol's doomed Jean de Florette.
The attraction of water from an underground source is that, unlike tap water, it is clean enough to drink without treatment. But there is an important distinction in this category. Although spring water has to be microbiologically safe when it comes out of the ground, it needn't have a constant composition and can be treated in other ways to remove undesirable substances. Natural mineral waters, meanwhile, have to conform to much stricter regulations - they have to come from "a naturally protected source", their composition of beneficial minerals, such as magnesium, must be constant and they must be free from harmful bacteria and all traces of pollution, without any treatment whatsoever.
It is doubtful, though, that this distinction is obvious to most consumers of bottled water. Spring waters cost less than natural mineral water, and their labelling makes an art of blurring the difference between the two without falling foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. To make matters even more opaque, natural mineral waters are all quite different. Their collective sales pitch is that they are untainted by the pollutants that turn up in surface water, and have been slowly and naturally purified as they filter through rock, collecting beneficial minerals en route. In fact, some natural mineral waters are only a few weeks old when bottled because their source, or "aquifer", is quite shallow. Others are much older. It's thought that Volvic, for example, takes three to five years to emerge, while the owners of Highland Spring estimate that its natural filtration process takes eight years.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, bottled waters were marketed on provenance, with invigorating images of towering peaks and primordial volcanic rock. Adverts featuring older than average but still beautiful models in verdant meadows hinted at water as the elixir of youth. The French, seasoned combatants in the water market, had the whip hand. Brand preferences were dictated by style. Those who liked the neutrality of Volvic or Evian (both owned by Danone) did not go for the naturally more heavily mineralised Vichy or Badoit, and vice versa. The only additive in use was carbon dioxide, employed to put a sparkle in waters naturally devoid of spritz. But as bottled water sales have soared in the UK, many established brands have all but abandoned their patrician platforms to maintain their place in a lucrative, and therefore congested, market. As one water mogul told the food trade magazine the Grocer, "The squeeze on price and the difficulty of differentiating natural waters has led to a search for water-based soft drinks with added flavours and functionality."
In other words, it's not good enough just to sell straight water; you now need to add something to it. So the flavoured water revolution that started with a relatively restrained twist of laboratory lemon'n'lime and a stiff shot of intense chemical sweetener has turned into a veritable fruit cocktail of faux flavourings. Particularly odd things are being done to water in the name of encouraging children to drink more. A sterling mission, but was Strathmore's spring water with added chocolate (flavour) really the answer?
With bottled water companies behaving like lemonade salesmen in their feverish pursuit of the latest gimmick - fancy a glass of spring water with added oxygen, anyone? - sections of the industry are concerned that such opportunism could have negative consequences for that ever-so-pure image they have carefully cultivated with consumers. After all, when tasted blind, many of the flavoured waters might easily pass for chemical pop. As if to reclaim some moral high ground, bottled water companies are now moving rapidly into "functional" waters, or "near waters", as they are known in Japan, which are meant to confer some health benefit. Early pioneers were Suntory's Vitamin Water and Kirin's Supli, which contained vitamins B1 and C, fibre and calcium, and were claimed to be the nutritional equivalent of a bowl of salad. Danone Activ, a chalky offering fortified with calcium which was launched in 2001, was an instant entry in the bottled water top 10.
Where does all this marketing creativity leave people who just want a nice, healthy, straightforward supply of decent drinking water, rather than a fashionable bottle to flash around at the gym? Nutritionists who promote a diet of unprocessed food (preferably organic, with the odd supplement thrown in) as the secret of good health recommend natural mineral water both for its natural purity and as a source of health-promoting minerals. But it has to come from glass bottles, because plastic bottles may release into the water phthalate esters, the agents that make plastic flexible, which may disrupt the endocrine system. Follow this counsel, however, and you'll need strong arms to hump your water around, a dogged commitment to glass recycling and, last but not least, deep pockets. As a rough guide, a family of four drinking the rule-of-thumb eight glasses a day, all in glass bottles, will face an annual bill of £1,500 or thereabouts. That's the sort of sum that severely tests any resolve to be a healthier, more hydrated New You.
You could filter your tap water, instead. In this bracket, fiddly, jug-type filters containing inadequate amounts of water are just for dilettantes. If you're serious, you'll need a plumbed-in system. Some are more sophisticated than others, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Most activated carbon filters, the most popular sort, claim to remove 95%-99% of all undesirables: chlorine, pesticides, heavy metals and so on. Installation typically costs less than £200, while cartridge changes will clock up another £100 each year. Water from this type of system will taste appreciably better than straight tap to all but the least discerning. But the fact remains that it has still been through two major purification treatments. That's oceans apart from the elusive freshness of that enticing mountain stream.
Alternatively, along with the great mass of the British population, you could spurn filters, bottles and taps entirely. Water is just one vast sea of complexity, so you might as well hit the caffeine and alcohol, and wait for your kidneys to pack up. But if you were prepared to begin drinking a little more water each day, what might be the pay-off? "You'll want to keep it up because you feel better," says Briffa. "Drinking more water is one of the simplest, cheapest ways of improving your general wellbeing."
Tantalising prospect, isn't it?
