Now there's a declaration you won't see in many health outlets. Stop drinking bottled water? To be fair, the tap versus bottled water bit has been argued before. This article, however, is playing devil's advocate in tackling the issue from a different perspective. Here are a few reasons one might consider dropping bottled water.

Penny pinchers might be surprised at how much of a poor deal bottled water really is. Buying it from a vending machine for $1 (a common price in many places) puts its value at 5 cents an ounce. Now start thinking about gasoline prices for a moment. From a consumer perspective, $3 per gallon gas prices comes out to roughly 2 cents an ounce. Are we really paying that much more for a renewable commodity like water?

Understandably their argument has some holes in it. For starters, we don't always buy our bottled water from vending machines. Many consumers get it in bulk. But the markup is undeniably obvious, which leads us to another reason why your kitchen tap could be a solid alternative. "Blue gold" -- as bottled water has come to be known -- is turning into a modern-day gold rush for large organizations. Between $50 and $100 billion is spent on bottled water every year, and corporations want their share. That's why a lot of corporations are buying up groundwater and privatizing water supplies.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not if you don't care that these resources are being taken out of the local economy. And we know what large companies are going to do with that water: package it up in nice little plastic bottles and turn a huge profit. Speaking of plastic bottles, that right there is another reason to kick the habit. We're producing 1.5 million tons of garbage a year ... just from bottled water! And this plastic takes 47 million gallons of oil to make in the first place. Ouch.

Okay, so now that we have this information, is it enough to deter someone from gulping down Aquafina at the gym or office? I seriously doubt it. Personally, I'm still going to be popping the top when I'm not at home (convenience still counts for a lot). When I'm at the house, however, I'm going to be using my filtered tap instead (it's cheaper and less wasteful). Some of these arguments are not without fault, but it takes a judgment call to weigh bottled water against the good old-fashioned kitchen tap.