“My dad used to tell me, or I guess he still tells me, that when you’re using tap water, you should try to have it on the coldest setting because if its too hot it’ll dissolve minerals in the pipes and that’s bad for you to ingest. So you should always use cold tap water.”
There is a lot of mistrust towards municipal water supplies and the plumbing that carries it in the United States, as exemplified by this advice. One only needs to look at Brita water filter sales to confirm that many people in the US do not trust that the water coming out of the tap is safe to drink. I feel there is a lot of paranoia about municipal water because the subject happens to combine two very important topics: the government and water. There is a lot of distrust and ill-will towards the government. Often, it seems like there is a general consensus that the government is inept and does not care about the well being of its citizens. Whether this is actually true or not is up for debate, but when this idea of governmental bungling is applied to water, a vital resource, we seem to tend to assume that there is no way that the government could be managing such a vital resource properly.