Bottled Water News Hard to Swallow

I was at the gym the other night with my fellow sufferers, each of us with a water bottle and the pained, haggard look emblematic of a good time in the ‘90s.

What saps!

Trying to have it all, we’d given it all up.

Ham and eggs? The devil’s own breakfast!

A pat of butter? The grease of death!

Long ago, we’d learned to spot the fatal danger in everyday delights. At restaurants, the others would tear into juicy slabs of prime rib but no thanks, that’s not for us; we would be happy--perfectly happy--with our grilled, skinless chicken breasts.

That was until we came to see grilled, skinless chicken breasts for the lethal objects they are--salmonella grenades waiting to explode.

Chinese food, tuna sandwiches, milk, cheese, nuts, sunflower seeds, popcorn, even granola: All made the least-wanted list in our orgy of self-denial.

So in the end we wound up sweating our hearts out on treadmills to nowhere, occasionally taking restorative nips of bottled water--the only ingestible thing besides tofu and organic dandelion greens that we could really, truly trust.

And now, the betrayal is complete.

Et tu, Crystal Geyser!

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The news hit the paper Wednesday.

Bottled water, while not aggressively bad for you, is no safer or cleaner than tap, according to a four-year study by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In fact, the researchers concluded, at least 25% of all bottled water comes not from gleaming alpine glaciers but from stainless-steel faucets. A brand of “spring water” was drawn not from the lovely mountain lake pictured on the label but from “an industrial parking lot next to a hazardous waste site,” according to the report.

Safeway water flows from a public water supply, the report claimed. Safeway denied the charge.

In a lawsuit filed the same day as the report’s release, the Environmental Law Foundation targeted eight companies that distribute bottled water in California. Among other things, the suit claimed that Crystal Geyser and three other brands should carry warnings, as required by state law, about the levels of arsenic they carry.

Arsenic!

It turns out that federal regulations allow the tiniest dab of arsenic--it’s natural, man--in tap water. The bottled waters that were tested all had less.

Even so, I was astonished to learn that my workout companion, my clear-eyed crony, my fluid friend packed a minuscule dollop of what we old-time homicide investigators like to call ... arsenic.

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When I moved here years ago from Colo-”It’s the water”-rado, I scoffed at Californians and their bottled water.

It was a local affectation, I shrugged--as harmless as wind chimes. But why would anyone spend good money on water?

I soon found out: It’s the water.

I live in midtown Ventura, where the water has a distinctive taste--a hint of natural spring, a heap of mattress spring. It is not a taste I would bottle.

But east Ventura has it worse. Even Steve Wilson, the city’s water superintendent, says he savors a deep draught from the west Ventura treatment plant more than the stuff--healthful as it is, he reminds us--that comes out of his east Ventura faucet. The brew in east Ventura comes from deep wells and is laden with more minerals than the river water that flows into homes in the rest of the city.

At a taste competition among west county water suppliers in the early ‘90s, Ventura fared poorly.

“We used east Ventura water,” Wilson explained.

Simi Valley, Moorpark, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Oxnard and Port Hueneme are served by the Calleguas Municipal Water District, which gets much of its supply from the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles. Last year, the MWD dazzled its customers by taking first place in a national taste test--the Academy Awards of water competitions--called Toast to the Tap.

But if you stroll into any Thousand Oaks gym tonight, you’ll find pained, haggard treadmill runners sucking down their bottled water.

I won’t give the stuff up. It tastes better, and I like the lakes and mountains on the labels. If I can sit through the TV news, I can handle a little arsenic. A guy’s got to drink.

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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.