Given the choice between fruit juice, water or a soft drink, I would probably chose pop nine times out of ten. Take soft drinks out of the equation, and I go to fruit juices. The last think I want to drink is water. The sad part is, every health related site all agree on one thing: I should be drinking more water.

Water either comes in one of two flavours: clean and refreshing or odd and disgusting. Every time you get a glass, you never know what you are going to get. At restaurants it is especially bad, as I will order water as my “healthy choice” as well as being cheap, and what ends up happening is I am served a drink that tastes like it came from a rain barrel. It tastes like metal, or like dirt, or like chemicals, and no amount of lemon wedges can fix the clear liquid.

At home, we live in a newer subdivision, and as they build new houses, they flush the lines with chemicals, and so our tap water constantly tastes like pool water. Who wants to drink eight nice cold glass of pool water every day? Not me!

So then I am stuck buying bottled water, large bottles for the water cooler, or buying and installing an expensive water filtration system. Sure, there are many other options, but they all come with downsides, just like the options I have already listed. Thus far, my wife and I have been doing the bottled water thing, but even some of those taste off to me, and the cost is ridiculous. I can buy pretty close to the same amount of the cheaper brand fruit juice for the same price as the bottled water.

If we take the water off the table for a second and focus in on the fruit juices, you’ll realize that they aren’t much better, according to the label, than some soft drinks. They are packed to the brim with sugars, and aren’t necessarily made with one hundred percent real fruit juice. If I wanted chemical flavoring, I would be sticking to the pop.

Thankfully, there are some juices that aren’t too bad, but doctors and nutritionists, all over the world, say that if you really want fruit juice, eat the fruit so that you get all the fiber and other advantages of actually eating the meat or pulp of the fruit.

It can be really hard to take in healthy drinks these days when soft drinks are cheaper than water, fruit juice might not have any actually fruit in it, and everything is so loaded with processed sugars that obesity and diabetes are on the rise all over North America.

How do you constantly get a cheap, easy source of clean, refreshing water or low calorie, low sugar juice? Because while I want to become healthy, I don’t want to put myself in the poor house to do it.