My cousin Steven drinks a lot of mineral water and since I spent Christmas and New Years with him and his family I tried some and I have to admit that I don’t get it. Why do people want bubbles in their water? So you can burp more? Then I got to wondering about the health effects: does bubbly water clean your insides out maybe? Or is the gas you’re drinking bad for you? It IS carbon dioxide, after all. The stuff we’re supposed to be exhaling and hurts our bodies when we inhale it directly through car exhaust or cigarettes (redundant?).
So I did some googling and found out that mineral water is good for you, cuz – duh- minerals, and is a good way for your body to absorb them if you can’t or don’t get them from other food sources. Okay. So that’s a go on naturally occurring fizzy spring-water – but what about artificially carbonated water? If the minerals are the only good thing about mineral-water then that doesnt make fizzy water good or bad for you.
So the question: Does carbonation make water, any tiny bit more unhealthy or dangerous?
How’s this for inventing a new drink: first, you discover an odd gas produced as a by-product of brewing beer. Next you pop some mice inside a bell jar containing the gas and observe that they all die. In a fit of inspiration you add the gas to some water and notice that it fizzes. Discovering that this sinister gas is, in fact, carbon dioxide – the very substance we make effortlessly when we breathe – you then try and persuade the world to drink the stuff. It sounds crazy but both Joseph Priestley and Jacob Schweppe thought it perfectly reasonable when they introduced 18th-century society to the joys of fizzy water.
The answer appears to be…. no:
There have even been studies looking at the effect of carbonated drinks on the stomach and gut. Among the many that showed there was no harm done was an American study on competitive cyclists. Even when exercising like lunatics and producing maximum amounts of CO2, consuming a little more of the gas via fizzy water made no difference to the bikers. And all of this is without even resorting to animal studies, such as the one from Poultry Science showing that fizzy drinks helped cockerels cope better with heat stress.
Unsurprisingly, given the hefty turnover of carbon dioxide our bodies deal with effortlessly each day, there remains no serious reason to think that carbonation makes water dangerous. Swapping a glass of plain old tap water for the bottled variety adds nothing save a little bit of sparkle.
