[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by kn

I'm living in a home that has a water softerner with a special filter for drinking water. Compared to the tap water, it simply tastes different, not better or worse. The fact that it's not very cold, I often just drink tap water.

I used to drink bottled water from the local Safeway/Superstore, but gave up on that, not really seeing the need to spend money that way.

Yesterday I was in an organic market and bought a bottle of Norwegian water - VOSS - for the heck of it (yes, the bottle attracted my attention):
http://www.vosswater.com/index.php/p...ill-nutrition/ It was $2.69 for 375 ml, roughly the size of a mug of coffee. To drink eight mugs a day would be $22.60/day or $678/month.

I must admit that it tasted awesome. I would describe it as "pure", "clean" or "smooth" but will fully admit it may be completely psychological. I will say it tasted better than my tap water but can't say it's better than other bottled water; I highly doubt I'd be able to discern the difference in a blind taste test. Searching online, opinions ran the gamut from drinking only VOSS to thinking it's no more than Norway's tap water, bottled.

And here's an example of how many specialty waters there are now available: http://www.aquamaestro.com/step1.asp

So is this a case of another sucker born every minute or are there really people who can discern the difference like with wine? Probably a more important question is whether any of these are "healthier" for you.

I think it is very much like wine, in that to a large extent, how your brain perceives it will taste a certain way before it touches your taste buds.

Since reported tastiness is a poor measure of true taste experience in the era of fMRI scanning machines, the researchers were careful enough to take a peek into their participant's brains as these tasted the wines, and found something fairly surprising: When tasting the wine out of the $10 bottle, the medial orbitofrontal cortex - an area of the brain that is strongly related to experiences of pleasure - showed only very little activity. When the exact same wine was poured out of a $90 bottle however, this brain area showed levels of activation which indicate that the participants were indeed drawing much more enjoyment from the same wine this time around. In other words, the price tag seemed to have a real physiological influence on the taster's taste experience.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...tag-have-taste

Me, I drink plain old tap water all the time. It's delicious.

P.S. Love your avatar