In German, the tap water is known to be very hard, so essentially no one drinks tap water. Instead, it’s common to drink alcoholic beverages (brewed, so they don’t have the same mineral level) or bottled mineral water. The mineral water does contain some lithium (and some mineral waters contain very high levels), but most bottled water in Germany does not have very high levels of lithium. In this study, the “medium” sample was 171 µg/L while the “high lithium” sample was 1724 µg/L. So people who generally drink the high lithium bottled water would be at the lower end of SMTM’s guesses, and everyone else would be safely outside of it.
In German, the tap water is known to be very hard, so essentially no one drinks tap water.
Our local tap water (in a town close to Munich) is roughly as soft as tap water can be, and I drink nothing else.
But if you’ve found statistics on how countries differ in how much tap water their citizens drink, I’d be interested to see them. Unfortunately, searching for “tap water consumption” includes all the other uses like showering etc.
Hm, this was mostly anecdotal from speaking to German friends (including people in Munich!), so I guess I was speaking too generally. Certainly more people drink bottled water in Germany at restaurants compared to many other countries, but I see that I was overstating the case for at home.
Restaurants in Germany don’t tend to offer free tap water, so you need to buy bottled water. I think that Germans just like the taste of sparkling mineral water, hence why they drink it so much.
In German, the tap water is known to be very hard, so essentially no one drinks tap water. Instead, it’s common to drink alcoholic beverages (brewed, so they don’t have the same mineral level) or bottled mineral water. The mineral water does contain some lithium (and some mineral waters contain very high levels), but most bottled water in Germany does not have very high levels of lithium. In this study, the “medium” sample was 171 µg/L while the “high lithium” sample was 1724 µg/L. So people who generally drink the high lithium bottled water would be at the lower end of SMTM’s guesses, and everyone else would be safely outside of it.
Our local tap water (in a town close to Munich) is roughly as soft as tap water can be, and I drink nothing else.
But if you’ve found statistics on how countries differ in how much tap water their citizens drink, I’d be interested to see them. Unfortunately, searching for “tap water consumption” includes all the other uses like showering etc.
Hm, this was mostly anecdotal from speaking to German friends (including people in Munich!), so I guess I was speaking too generally. Certainly more people drink bottled water in Germany at restaurants compared to many other countries, but I see that I was overstating the case for at home.
Restaurants in Germany don’t tend to offer free tap water, so you need to buy bottled water. I think that Germans just like the taste of sparkling mineral water, hence why they drink it so much.
Drinking tap water in restaurants is unusual but most consumed beverages are not drunk in restaurants in Germany.
As far as there is a preference for sparkling water, people who like sparkling water often have the equipment to add sparkle to tap water.
I live in Berlin and both myself and other people I know drink a good amount of tap water. Coffee and tea are also usually made from tap water.