![]() Unfortunately, SSB manufacturers are not required to publish a beverage quality report while perceptions of water safety based on difficult to read CCRs could represent a barrier to promoting water as an alternative to SSB. ‘Drink water instead of sugary drinks’ is one of the seven key selected messages for consumers in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans ( US Department of Agriculture & US Department of Health and Human Services 2010). Yet, on a given day, half of the US population over the age of 2 years consumes sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB), which represents a significant source of daily calories ( Ogden et al. Tap water in the USA is readily available, regulated and monitored for safety, calorie-free, and low cost. Suggestions for reorienting language and scientific information in CCRs to be easily comprehensible to the public are offered. These findings expose a wide chasm that exists between current water quality reports and their effectiveness toward being understandable to US residents. The CCR readability ease was found to be equivalent to that of the Harvard Law Review journal. The analysis revealed that CCRs were written at the 11th–14th grade level, which is well above the recommended 6th–7th grade level for public health communications. Readability (or ‘comprehension difficulty’) was evaluated using Flesch–Kincaid readability tests. This study evaluated the readability of a nationally representative sample of 30 CCRs, released between 20. ![]() These reports have excellent potential for providing the public with accurate information on the safety of tap water, but there is a lack of research on the degree to which the information can be understood by a large proportion of the population. These reports encapsulate information regarding sources of water, detected contaminants, regulatory compliance, and educational material. The United States Environmental Protection Agency mandates that community water systems (or water utilities) provide annual consumer confidence reports (CCRs) – water quality reports – to their consumers.
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