I’ll say that after all the testing I’ve done on various  popular brands of bottled water the best of the popular bottled water brands is Essentia. I don’t want to be too technical with my facts about water in this blog post, but you can see the huge chart I’ve developed on the link, above, for many more bottled water facts and comparisons than I can give here. Essentia water is purified by reverse osmosis, remineralized and then ionized. Health enthusiasts love Essentia because it’s been ionized.

I’m sure that, prior to bottling, this water was very good. It is still the better of the other bottled waters, but please read further [and watch the video] to see a huge difference between Essentia bottled ionized water and the ionized water you can get fresh from the WellBlue water ionizer pitcher or the Jupiter Athena water ionizer.

I chose Essentia for this particular test, to represent the best of bottled water, the Jupiter Athena water ionizer to represent the best of ionized water [and now with UltraWater filters it represents the best filtered water too], and St. Louis tap water actually happens to represent the best of all tap water. I added the WellBlue ionizer pitcher into the “bottled water / tap water / ionized water” comparison testing in order to represent the most value and portability for an ionized water device.

Here’s the video:

So, How did Essentia Bottled Water vs Fresh Ionized Water Do?

Essentia is Alkalizing:

Essentia claims to be alkalizing and bottled-ionized-water, and though that is a true statement it has long since lost its antioxidants. Essentia’s pH was 10.2, which is nicely alkalizing. However the WellBlue was even more alkalizing at a pH of 10.5. [I should say that the St. Louis tap water has a pH of 9.5, so the basis of source water for the WellBlue in this test was higher than most municipal water would be.] The Athena can be set higher or lower than this, but for this particular test I used the setting Level 3 and it came out quite alkalizing at an 11.3 pH.

Essentia was void of anti-oxidants though!

A far more significant quality of freshly ionized water, as compared to Essentia or any brand of bottled water, is the ORP. ORP represents “oxidation reduction potential”, which is another way of saying antioxidants. Both Essentia and St. Louis tap water were almost identical, with a positive 205 ORP [which means they are oxidizing and contain an abundance of free radicals]. The WellBlue pH water ionizer pitcher was amazing at -431 ORP [which is a very high level of antioxidants]. [By the way that filter is still going strong after about 70 gallons of filtration so far.] The Jupiter Athena of course surpassed all others with an ORP of -787. [Interesting Side Note: The benefits I have experienced from this high of an antioxidant level in my water is that my spider veins went away…literally before my very eyes!]

Essentia’s Bottle or Any Water Bottle has Problems With Plastics

Because Essentia is in a BPA-Free plastic bottle does not mean there are no other toxins in that bottle that could possibly leach into the water over the shelf-live of the water. For many years no one knew about BPA. Now that it’s known many companies are careful to eliminate it. However, how many other toxins, hormones, etc. do we not know about yet? Plastics are also filling up the Earth’s landfills. Even right now, with recycling efforts in full-swing, we cannot use all of the recycled goods that are collected. It’s such a good idea, but when we keep on adding more and more to our production of plastic wastes it overwhelms the system.