Water for Baby formula when on holiday in America

[EmilyRobyn]

My baby will be 3 months old when we go to America (we live in the UK) I am worried about to what water to use for her bottles. Boiled tap water? Or boiled bottled water? Any advise from anyone who has visited America with a formula fed baby?

Which bit of America?

Just by the cartons of made up stuff.

Your not supposed to use bottle water they often have to higher a minerals content. I would have thought the tap water in most of the US would be OK. I would google the area where you are going. Or the other option is pre made formula.

They do baby friendly bottled water. Americans don't even heat it. Depending on where you are th e tap water might be fine.

Also depending on where you are staying you may not have a kettle.

In my experience of the US (Northeast), tap water is safe but it doesn’t taste nice unless you filter it through a britax filter or similar. This may not be true everywhere in the US. You can buy drinking water by the gallon in any supermarket or convenience store and that’s probably your best bet. It isn’t mineral water, so it shouldn’t be high in dissolved minerals. You can also often buy distilled water. Hotel rooms (and many homes) don’t have kettles. You can buy electric kettles fairly cheaply, or take a travel kettle if you need one.

Right, how are midwives still not explaining this correctly??

The boiling is to kill bugs in the formula, NOT THE WATER.

If the tap water is safe for you, it's safe for the baby.

So as long as the formula is placed in boiling water it's doesn't matter what you top up with,

Florida it is !

Florida?

Florida?

I took DD to Florida at 7 months. We used the nursery water that was sold in all the big supermarkets and small pharmacy's (walgreens/CVS). I did boil it but I don't think locals do. They just use it from the bottle.
My DD was on nutramigen formula due to milk allergy and found we could buy the ready made big bottles which were so handy for days out.

This is the one we used. There are lots of brands to choose from.

You can buy gallon jugs of distilled water, I'd use that. I don't live in Florida, but as far as I know, it's available throughout the US.

Is tap water actually undrinkable in Florida op? You need it be boiling to add to the formula to make it up anyway.

When I lived there I used distilled water and you can buy it by the gallon from supermarkets, pharmacies etc. I’ve even used small bottles of dasani that you get everywhere in a pinch. Like most other countries Americans usually make formula with room temp water so wouldn’t boil it but if you want to stick by doing it the British then you could and then stick in a flask for when you’re out. Ready made might be easier though! Where we lived there was a lot of old buildings and high prevalence of lead pipes to the point where a lead blood test was mandatory for daycare and school enrolment, so I personally wouldn’t risk tap water even if boiling it. But Florida probably doesn’t have that issue?! But with a young baby I’d go for the distilled to be on the safe side.

I'd say buy the premade formula or the bottles of water that is baby safe in the baby section in the grocery store. I used to boil the kettle and let it cool a bit to make up formula when we lived there and used the premade when on a long day out or overnight away from home.

Thank you so much everyone! This helped a lot!

Do you mean which State?
LMAO
🤩

The USA is bigger than we can all imagine!

Now I have to ask this, Why do Americans buy distilled water?

By the way as a rule you shouldn't actually drink distilled water. I mean you can but as a child/adult it is missing the needed minimals that normal drinking water has. I'm assuming American baby powder has these in. But if you drink if it really doesn't actually taste of anything. 🤷‍♀️ and I kind of feel like it's another marketing gimike they have come up with to sell you something extra.

Note: you should still be boiling the water in order to sterilise the baby powder when you make the bottles. Using distilled water won't make any difference to this. I've seen algae grow nicely in our distilled water bottles at work.

No I mean which bit. States are massive too

Buy the water from shop that people have mentioned above. If Florida is ok for the lead thing then tap would be ok. You must make formula with water above 70c so boil it first. (Lots of Americans don’t and that’s what caused the formula shortages when babies got sick from bacteria in the formula. )

@MigGril I honestly don’t know, I’d never heard of it until I moved to the US. There’s likely some reasoning as my FIL, who’s health-conscious and reads up on everything, gave all his children distillers several years ago!

I can’t say that we’ve used ours much!

Don’t they add fluoride to the water in America?
I don’t know what the means for bottle fed babies though.

They like drinking bottled water, which is mostly cultural and not unique to Americans e.g. the French drink a lot of bottled water too even though their tap water is fine. Then for formula distilled is preferable because the minerals aren’t usually ok for babies, like you can use evian but most other brands you can’t but for everyone else I think it comes down to distilled cheapest and mineral water is more expensive. Like when we had questionable water, the city gives free lead test kits and ultimately it was fine but whilst waiting on that I bought distilled because it was cheapest!

Which is also added to tap water in some parts of the UK, but it's still OK to use it once boiled for babies.

I've no idea why we have a different in water areas over here but we do 🤷‍♀️.

Just to say that kettles take a LONG time to boil in the US as their power (voltage?) is a lot lower than ours. It’s why you don’t get them in hotels, in fact in all my years of going there I’ve never seen one.