**This post is sponsored by Gerolsteiner through a partnership with Fitapproach, as always all thoughts and opinions are mine.**
Gerolsteiner’s #SparklingDetox is going to be starting in mid September and I’m so excited! I just spent a week in the Alps and boy are mineral waters popular in Europe.
Gerolsteiner and I want you to join us for the #SparklingDetox Challenge from Sept 12 – 15. Don’t forget to join the Sparkling Detox Facebook Group so you can meet other detoxers. Fitness Expert & Nutritionist, Ariane Hundt (link to page about Ariane http://www.gerolsteiner-usa.com/enjoy-life.html) will be sharing tips and guidance during the detox.
Also, check out this link to a cool Mineral Calculator, http://www.mineral-calculator.com/the-mineral-calculator.html, that is on Gerolsteiner’s website. Before I left, I checked out what sparkling natural mineral waters are in that area.
Gerolsteiner’s mineral calculator compares the amount of calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, potassium, sodium, chloride & sulfate in the water and gives you a total mineral content for 1 liter of water.
Having lived in Italy in college, almost 20 years ago, yikes! I am familiar with some of the brands that I could compare in the calculator. I picked 3 other brands that I felt like I could find in France, Italy & Switzerland and then set out to find them and do a taste test.
I decided to go global since we would be visiting 3 countries during our trip. I tried Gerolsteiner Sparkling (German), San Pellegrino & Perrier. I wanted to try a few other brands but they weren’t readily available in Chamonix – Mont Blanc. There were however a lot of other brands of both sparkling & flat mineral waters that were sold in various restaurants. Surprising to me, San Pellegrino was quite popular in this area of France. We were served it at every dinner. Perrier was also quite popular – I saw it in all the Casino’s (grocery store).
According to the Mineral Calculator here are the mineral contents of the different waters.
Could I taste the difference? Oooh….interesting question.
I moved to Italy when I was 22 as part of a consortia program with Indiana University, 9 other US universities and the Universita di Bologna for a year of study abroad. Do you believe I’m pretty sure when I moved to Italy I had never had sparkling mineral water?
I have cousins that live in Rome and showed me around the city and shared their favorite meals with me. It was interesting that at restaurants, they don’t give out glasses of tap water like we do here, you would ask for either acqua naturale or acqua minerale or frizzante. I quickly learned that naturale was flat mineral water and frizzante/minerale/gassata was sparkling and my family, at least at the time, drank a lot of acqua gassata.
I remember when I moved back to the States for my last semester at IU, I was craving acqua minerale, but mineral water here is way more expensive than it is in Europe & as a poor college student, I was buying 2 liters of sparkling water, which I later found out was nothing more than carbonated water. Insert sad face emoji here lol.
When was the first time you had Sparkling Mineral Water? And did you notice a difference?
