Saturday, March 7, 2009

Are You Drinking Clean Water? Not If You're Drinking Tap Water.

By Peter Abertoning

Whilst many people focus on the importance of diet to their health, there is no doubt that drinking clean water is also vital to good health. And sadly for Americans, those who drink water from the tap aren't drinking clean drinking water.

Drinking clean water is essential to our health from a number of different points of view. Right now thousands are dying of Cholera in Zimbabwe from drinking water contaminated with Cholera.

There is no cholera in the US, but that doesn't mean that our drinking water supplies are clean. In fact there are hundreds of different contaminants that can be found in our drinking water, and although they won't kill us fast like cholera will they are still damaging to our health over time.

Think about this. Lead is dangerous to us if we ingest it. Most people are aware of this. The EPA itself has stated that lead in our drinking water is the number one environmental health problem for our childrens health. Even low levels of lead in water can lead to developmental problems for children including learning difficulties and behavioral problems and more.

That's lead. In our drinking water. How could there possibly be lead in our water when we're supposed to have world leading clean water supplies?

Lead contaminating our water is an ongoing problem. Lead comes from many sources, but the most common sources are from our pipes. It is estimated that around 98% of households have lead in their pipes. That comes from lead lined pipes or soldered joints in our pipes which contain lead. Most lead in our drinking water actually enters our water somewhere in the house.

The EPA recognises that there is no safe level of lead in our water, that any exposure to lead is dangerous, especially to children.

And lead is just the start of the contaminants that we find in our drinking water that means that clean drinking water is just a dream.

This is pretty scary, and you'd be forgiven for wondering what you can do to make sure you're drinking clean water. How do you make sure your drinking water is clean. Should you be drinking bottled water?

The FDA has said "Companies that market bottled water as being safer than tap water are defrauding the American public." And there's good reason for that statement. Simply because there are no government regulations that specify that bottled water should be any safer than tap water. And some bottled water is just tap water, and the price of bottled water is higher, quantity for quantity, than the price of gas. Bottled water is a fraud.

And bottled water is an environmental disaster, with countless plastic bottles manufactured to go into landfill.

So clearly drinking bottled water isn't the answer to clean water. So what do you do if the prospect of drinking lead or any one of the other contaminants like drugs, pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, chlorine or more repulses you? You use a high quality water filter. The best water filters will remove just about all contaminants from the water you drink. The best filters will filter 99.99% of chlorine for instance.

How do you know that? Because it's perfectly possible to test this and independent tests can show the efficacy of different water filters and ensure that if they claim certain results these can actually be achieved. The very best drinking water filters should filter out over 97% or 98% of just about everything nasty, including some contaminants that you've probably never even heard of.

One example for you. There is bromochloroacentontrile in our water. What is it? What does it do to you? Have you even heard of it? It doesn't matter at all if you use the best water filters money can buy, because over 97% of it is gone.

So if this article is beginning to open your eyes to the risks of drinking unfiltered tap water and bottled water you aren't alone. You have a right to be drinking clean water but you aren't. The way to make sure you are is to get the best drinking water filters it's possible to get and use it to make sure you're drinking clean drinking water.

And you'd be forgiven for assuming that the best drinking water filter was the most expensive, but it's not. Find out more about drinking water filters at my website.

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