Yes I know I am a very clever Cat who has opinions and no matter how much I am told to shut up my fat mouth I tend to ramble on and on about the things that I not only believe passionately about but as well of course I do like to also point out the stupid things that you humans do – I’m sorry I just can’t help it – it is what clever Cats do, well it is what this one does!

For ages now I have been trying to ‘out’ idiots like Bono ‘the climate clown,’ and of course Al ‘Gas Guzzling’ Gore for the way that they jet around the world using up precious resources so that they can point and then wag fingers at ordinary folk lecturing them about how wasteful they are and how they are causing the death of the planet – all of this with no regard to the fact that the planet has seen ice ages come and go as well as hotter arid times and that long after these dreadful busybodies have moved on to earning more money on their next fad somewhere else the planet will still be spinning on its merry way until we are all turned into nothing by the sun exploding or sooner by a meteorite doing more or less the same thing but not as quickly.

“So what is it this time that has had the opinionated Cat fizzing about?” I hear you ask with a sigh, well the answer is simple and ‘fizzing’ has a lot to do with this subject, just as ‘still’ and ‘sparkling’ do in fact!

I am talking of course about water – not the natural stuff from rivers, rain, lakes, ponds or indeed the safer stuff that drips out of leaky taps – I am talking about the stuff that is “filtered through limestone” “gently flavoured” (of course that means sugared) “is so good for you” indeed I am talking about the stuff that is bottled, naturally carbonated (how does that happen?) and comes in glass, or so much worse plastic, bottles.

Bottled water is something that hundreds of millions of people who don’t have to drink, drink! The water from most of the developed world that comes out of a tap is perfectly drinkable and bottled water is only a necessity in countries that don’t have proper drinking water treatment plants, these countries include but not exclusively the usual favourites for dysentery China, India, many of the ‘stans in Asia and so on. In fact Delhi of course gave its name to one such complain the infamous ‘Delhi Belly.’ (Or as my spell checker insisted – ‘Deli Belly which I think may be caused by eating too much Salami – but that isn’t important here).

Mind you there is no bottle of water in those aforementioned countries that this Cat would drink until it had been carefully boiled, cooled and disinfected with water purifying tablets – this Cat isn’t stupid and I followed very strict personal hygiene guidelines when he was researching his latest soon-to-be-released-blockbusting-book my Travelogue!

So back to the reality of the ‘real’ world where, as I mentioned a minute ago, and so it must be true, people drink gallons of bottled water for no reason what so ever, well except for the dumb reasons they trot out when you mention that drinking bottled water is a bit daft – you know the sort of reasons they are, they are supplied by cosmetic counter sales girls who quote Nobel Prizing winning sudo-science at you to convince you that you should buy a re-hydrating product as well as drink bottles and bottles of water a day to save your skin from ageing. Which, sad to say, water can’t actually do – but that is almost beside the point.

The people who drink water in vast quantities and are dumb enough to lug enormous bottles of the stuff around every day say that their bodies need water and any other fluid just isn’t as good as the “forgotten functional food’ that they call water because it ‘re-hydrates’ your body, is good for your skin, liver and just about everything else – now where have I heard that before? Oh yes, in American Cowboy films when the swindler in the covered wagon rolls into town to sell his ‘patent’ cure all potion.

The honest truth is that you just simply don’t need to drink gallons of water a day to stay hydrated. I bet you don’t believe me when i say that you could easily drink Tea for instance instead, but don’t take my word for that statement, listen to what Prof. Tom Sanders, Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at King’s College London, says on the subject of water in a recent article in The Independent Newspaper. “Tea is the most widely consumed beverage throughout the world, and there must be a reason for that. It’s actually a functional food and by that I mean it hydrates the human body.” And you thought only water was that magical!

So before you decide to improve the muscles of one arm any further by lugging around enormous bottles of water do take a moment to think about the alternatives – and they don’t have to be drunk – Cucumber is 95% water, a jacket potato contains 70% water, an egg is 70% water and even a Chicken is 65% water.

Add all of the food that contains water that we put into our bodies everyday and it comes so close to a litre of water as to not matter much – I would say “within a whisker of a litre of water” but then ‘whiskers’ are a very sensitive subject to Cats and we tend never to mention them unless we have to! Oh drat I just have haven’t I?

So after you have eaten all of that water bearing food there is one trick left for the body and the business of hydration and that is that the body actually produces water metabolically.

All of which means that the craze to drink water like err ‘crazy’ is just plain daft and if we took a sensible pill with the last noisy glug of our bottled water then we would realise that by not buying gallons of water in plastic and glass bottles we could help save the planet from not only the unbiodegradable nature of the plastic bottles and the single use of all glass bottles of water we could stop water being shipped around the world to sell in other countries and again save a lot of energy for much more important things.

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