By Scott Klinger
"We sell waterÖso weíve got to be clever," once mused an executive of NestlÈ, the worldís leading producer of bottled water.

The latest cleverness of the bottled water industry is "enhanced water." The best-known enhanced water brand, Glaceau, produces such brands as VitaminWater and SmartWater. World beverage giant Coca-Cola has just purchased Glaceau for $4.1 billion.

Those of us who grew up being encouraged to "eat our vegetables" are now being encouraged to have our children instead supplement their diets with vitamin-enhanced water.

But does Vitamin Water enhance consumersí diets, or is it, as the NestlÈ executive predicted, merely a clever way to enhance corporate profits?

Vitamin Water commonly sells for $1.39 for a 20-ounce bottle. If a family of three were to consume daily the 64 ounces of water per person that the bottled water industry recommends for proper hydration, that family would consume 67 bottles of Vitamin Water a week at a cost of $93.13. A similar amount of tap water would cost less than a nickel.

I recently took a trip to my neighborhood food market to see what sort of nutrition I could get for my family for $93. With one cart chock full of 67 bottles of Vitamin Water, my other cart contained more than 50 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables, including two pounds of asparagus, six pounds of apples, four pounds of tomatoes, a dozen ears of fresh corn, two heads of lettuce and two bunches of spinach.

In one cart I had over 8,000 calories worth of sugar water (ounce for ounce, Vitamin Water has over half as much sugar as Coke Classic; sugar is the second most prevalent ingredient in both); laced with sufficient doses of B and E vitamins to meet daily requirements as well as a few herbal supplements. If you drank the full 64 ounces of Vitamin Water, you would consume 20 percent of your daily recommended allowance of calories along with a sliver of the other nutrition required for good health. In the other cart, I had a cornucopia of vitamins, minerals and fiber-- all with no added sugars -- that could sustain my familyís health.

While the claims that bottles of water can enhance our nutrition appear far-fetched, there is no doubt that taking our water (often our tap water) and placing it in expensive bottles is greatly enhancing the profits of huge corporations. Americans spend more than $20,000 every minute of every day on bottled water. Each year, more than 18 million barrels of oil are used worldwide simply to produce the plastic for the bottles of water that provide a few moments of refreshment, after which most end up spending the next 1,000 years in a landfill before they decompose.

The really smart water consumers drink tap water, the same tap water that the producers of Vitamin Water use in their product. And if you really must have vitamin water, it is far better to throw some of those pounds of apples, oranges, pears and carrots from your cart into your blender.

We too have to be clever, for there are corporations seeking to enhance their profits at the expense of our familiesí health.

Scott Klinger is the research director for Corporate Accountability International, formerly Infact, a nonpartisan membership organization that protects people by waging campaigns challenging irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world. www.stopcorporateabuse.org . This column distributed by MinutemanMedia.

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