I wrote about chlorine in drinking water yesterday. Here’s some more about chorinated water

Yesterday we had a reader contact us asking about our article about chlorinated drinking water, and the risks of drinking water contaminated with chlorine.

He asked a question about a point that we hadn’t covered. If we don’t like chlorine in the water we drink, what would happen if we didn’t have the chlorine?

Good point well made. We didn’t actually advocate the discontinuation of chlorine purification from municipal water supplies. Chlorine fulfills a very important function.

There is absolutely no doubt that our water supplies, including our drinking water, can be contaminated with various bugs and living organisms that would seek to do us harm. If we were to drink water that had not been treated for contamination by organisms like bacteria we would all run a very high risk of getting seriously ill.

We advocate the use of water filtration to remove water contaminants of any kind, and advocate the importance of drinking clean water. Chlorine free drinking water.

Chlorine works well to kill nasties that may be in our water, and this is good. If the chlorine wasn’t there our water would be just about undrinkable from a health point of view, just look at what is happening in Zimbabwe right now with people contracting cholera, sometimes from contaminated water.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, chlorine is necessary in municipal water to combat living contaminants.

For some people it isn’t necessary to have chlorine in our water. The authors have chosen to install rainwater tanks (and we use the best water filter to filter that water) so that they are drinking the cleanest water possible, and it isn’t necessary to chlorinate rainwater. Well so far it isn’t necessary. But municipal water supplies are different.

So don’t get us wrong, chlorine currently performs an essential task, and will probably be in our water for a long time. Just remember, you don’t need to drink chlorine. The best water filters will remove it, so your water is uncontaminated by chlorine.

Modern carbon filtering successfully removes chlorine. Read the rest of this entry

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Does the chlorine put in our water expose us to the risk of cancer?

Interesting question and one which, unfortunately, there is no one authoritative answer. Chlorine in drinking water is the subject of much debate.

Because like all these things it’s pretty hard to prove one way or the other. But it seems that there is a definite link between drinking chlorinated water and getting cancer, and there are studies suggesting that drinking chlorinated water can indeed cause cancer. It seems the risks of chlorine in our water are there.

How do we know? Well take this quote from the Medical College of Wisconsin, Senior Research Team.

“We are quite convinced, based on this study, that there is an association between cancer and chlorinated water.”

Now that’s a little scary isn’t it? They seem quite convinced that there is a clear link between chlorine in our drinking water and cancer.

How about this. “The Australian”, an Australian newspaper, reported on January 20th 2007 that “swimming or showering in or drinking chlorinated water may all be linked with an increased risk of bladder cancer” based on a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology by Spanish researchers.

And even back in the 1960s there was a book published by a doctor linking chlorine in water to the development of atheroschlerosis. Atheroschlerosis is a major disease leading to heart attacks and death.

Here’s a quote from the U.S. Council of Environmental Quality: “Cancer risk among people using chlorinated water is as much as 93% higher than among those whose water does not contain chlorine.”

You’d be surprised at how much chlorine there can be in your drinking water. It is quite possible to test your chlorine levels, there is a simple test kit that you can buy commercially, it’s not expensive. You’d be surprised to know that often the chlorine levels in your tap  water are higher than that of swimming pool water. That’s why it tastes so bad.

The health risks of chlorine aren’t necessarily from the chlorine itself. The problems come from the chemicals formed as a byproduct of having the chlorine in the water.  Chlorine in water mixes with other substances to form chemicals called trihalomethanes and it is suspected that it is the action of these trihalomethanes that does damage to our body, damaging cells and initiating cancer.

So it seems that there are clear links between having chlorine in our drinking water and disease. Though not fully proven these links are strong enough to convince us, at least, that we don’t want to be drinking chlorine.

How? The worlds best water filters remove chlorine from drinking water. When you consider the risk of cancer, the cost of removing chlorine from our water is tiny indeed. It is even possible to get high quality filters to enable whole house water filtering so that you can remove chlorine from you shower water and all other water you consume in the house.

There’s no doubt that we  are all taking a risk drinking chorinated water. It’s simple to remove, and filtering chlorine out of your water may well be the best thing you could ever do for your health. Read the rest of this entry

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If you accept that our water is laced with nasty things, should we be drinking distilled water?

We’ve written quite a bit about some of the contaminants found in water. Lead, chlorine, flouride, industrial chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, drugs and much more.

According to the Ralph Nader Institute there are anywhere up to 2100 toxic chemicals in our drinking water, so I’m sure you can see the need to filter your drinking water, or even using a whole house water filter so that you can wash in filtered water, and even wash your clothes in filtered water. Unclean water even affects your clothes.

But we digress. Back to distilled water.

Surely distilled water has to be the cleanest drinking water?

Distilled water is water that is produced by boiling water, usually contaminated water, collecting the steam and reconstituting it into water by cooling. If you hold a plate over the top of the kettle when it’s boiling you’re collecting distilled water.

Water distillation removes contaminants from water, no doubt. But it has a problem, and for this reason drinking distilled water is not recommended at all, except perhaps in small quantities.

You see distilling water results in all the minerals being removed. Now whilst we want our water filtered distilling our water is not the best water filtration method. The minerals it removes are beneficial to our bodies, and so aren’t getting them drinking distilled water.

And not only that, water that is distilled can attract minerals to replace those lost, and so can leach important salts and other minerals from our body. This can be quite dangerous.

Yes certainly you need the best water filter money can buy, preferably as a whole house filter so that all your water is filtered, but drinking distilled water is not the answer.

There is some suggestion that because distilled water sucks up other substances so well it can be useful as part of a toxin elimination diet. This may be so but is outside the area of this website. Read the rest of this entry

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Did you know that our bodies are 70% water? So do you think the quality of the water we drink affects our health?

Yes that’s right,  our bodies are 70% water believe it or not. Why don’t we all run down the drain? Who knows.

But it makes you think doesn’t it? Actually our brain if over 75% water and our livers 95%.

And our nerves are like little rivers, made up mainly of water too, and it’s believed that the signals that travel along our nerves, from our brain and other organs, are essential to our well being. If our nerves don’t transmit the signals properly many scientists believe, we get sick in one way or another.

And there’s so much evidence that our drinking water is contaminated by so many toxins. And when we drink our water (unless we drink high quality filtered water or water purified in some way) those toxins get into our bodies, and could well result in some problem with our nerves transmitting those signals.

Contaminants like lead for example. A cumulative toxin that, once it gets into our bodies remains there. And there’s clear evidence that there is lead in much of our drinking water.

The Ralph Nader Institute estimates that there are up to 2100 toxic chemicals in our drinking water.

Herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, industrial chemicals, chlorine and all sorts of other contaminants that have long chemical names that you couldn’t even pronounce.

It’s extremely scary.

Drinking water contamination is considered by many to be one of the major causes of disease in our society. After all if you’re drinking all that stuff it’s hard to imagine that it COULDN’T affect us. It just makes sense that drinking contaminated water must affect our bodies and make us sick.

So what do you do about it? There are some excellent water filtration systems available. You’ve probably heard of all sorts of different types of water purification methods. They include reverse osmosis, charcoal filtration,  ceramic water filtration, water distillation, ultraviolet and magnetic filtration, ionized water filtration, bottled water and more.

They all have disadvantages and advantages. However it seems clear on balance that Aquasana Water Filters are the best water filters you can get. That is one of the reasons why they have been voted the best buy by Consumers Digest magazine for 5 of the last 7 years.

The cost of water filtration or water purification is minimal compared to your health.  Aquasana water filters provide the cleanest water it’s possible to get for around 9 cents a gallon, way cheaper than just about any other form of water purification. Read the rest of this entry

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What is there in our water? How about drugs? Here’s a story to get you thinking.

We’ve talked about some of the things that you find in our water. Heavy metals, chlorine, lead, pesticides, herbicides, and thousands of other chemicals. It’s enough to scare you.

In fact that’s the idea, we’re here to point these sorts of things out to you if you weren’t already aware of the sorts of toxins that may be in your water, and to suggest strongly that you may want to consider using a high quality water filter.

Here’s some more scary news. It drugs in water. Now this story doesn’t relate to drinking water in the US. However it shows you some of the potential problems you can find with your drinking water.

It’s a story about drugs in drinking water in India.

A river in India, (the Iska Vagu) is so contaminated with drugs that it smells. In one day there was enough of a particular antibiotic released into the river to treat 90000 people.

Tests showed 21 different pharmaceuticals in the water, including drugs to treat hypertension, liver diseases, heart disease, depression, ulcers and lots more.

And of course anyone who drinks that water, like the locals who use it for drinking water, are drinking this cocktail of drugs in their contaminated water supply. The drugs come from a Pharmaceutical factory upstream.

Imagine what drinking contaminated water like that would do to you?

Think it can’t happen in the US? Think we’re drinking clean water here, that this sort of thing only happens in India? Get real.

You’ll read in the full story that last year Associated Press found trace levels of drugs in the drinking water of up to 46 million Americans. Trace levels aren’t nearly as high as what was found in the Indian river, but it’s still there, and it’s still scary.

And in 1999 a high school student from West Virginia did a school science project on drugs in rivers. She took water samples over 10 weeks along the Ohio River and had them tested for 3 common antibiotics, penicillin, tetracycline and vancomycin. The tests found them in all samples, and she then did the same with tap water. Same result. Antibiotics are in the water that came out of the tap.

You simply must protect the health of you and your family by drinking clean uncontaminated water that has been filtered through the worlds best drinking water filter.

There is simply no other way to ensure that you’re drinking clean water. And if you think drinking bottled water is better then read our story about bottled water.

Read the rest of this entry

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Here’s a pretty scary video for you. You won’t drink unfiltered water again.

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