Dasani, the bottled water from Coca Cola, is not pure water. It proudly declares on the label “Enhanced with minerals for a pure, fresh taste!” But if you read the ingredients, you see that means it includes:
Filtered water, magnesium sulfate, potassium chloride, salt
Yuck! Water is supposed to be tasteless (it certainly shouldn’t taste like magnesium sulfate, anyway) so I’m assuming they add those extra ingredients to increase shelf life or something like that.
Does anyone know why those extra ingredients are added to Dasani?
Uh, no. The mineral content is still FAR lower than that of your normal body fluids; as such, it will not make you thirsty no matter how much you drink.
Pure water – either distilled or deionized – tastes terrible. Feel free to buy some and drink it. (If it’s really pure, it can’t hurt you.) The trace minerals do add noticable flavor.
People generally feel that water should taste like spring water. The most common anions in spring water are calcium, magnesium, patassium, and sodium. The most common cations are sulfate and chloride. There are frequenty small amounts of iron, copper, aluminum, fluorides and nitrates, but these are not considered desirable and add an off taste. It seem like Dasani has the common salts covered except for calcium. Some taste panel probably decided that the water tastes better without calcium.
My understanding is that they use reverse osmosis to purify the water and then add the minerals to it to taste good, but by controlling the amount and type of minerals added, they can ensure a consistent taste. (Basically that’s the same process used to make a Coke; start with purified water and then add ingredients in specific quantities so the taste is always the same.)
Many people like the flavor of lightly mineralized water. Not me, personally - I’ve always thought Dasani tastes weird. But I suppose if some company was able to duplicate the mineral content of my hometown water, I’d think “that’s perfect - this is the way water is supposed to taste.”
Yes. Nor is there any chance that it ever will be, at least under that name. The negative publicity was a bit too much. People assume that bottled water comes from a natural spring. They don’t want to be sold tap water, least of all tap water that’s been treated to add dangerous stuff that wasn’t there to start with. The whole thing felt like a scam.
OK, I know it’s been said, but ALL water on earth is recycled endlessly-how much (of Julius caeser’s urine0, do you get in a bottle of dasani?
Why would spring water be any better than treated river water?
Or take that super-expensive stuff frok Norway (Voss Water)-its from melted glacial ice. How much better is that?
Dasani is just Coke without the syrup and carbonation. You’re paying as much or more for bottled tap water as you would for Coke. I’ll bet the Coke people spent an entire day high 5ing each other when they found out they could get people to pay that much for tap water.
No offense to you, Ex_Chemist, but I drink distilled water every day. I like the way it tastes. I drink it, at room temperature, all day long. It’s steam distilled.