Sunday, November 1, 2009

Is Your Drinking Water Clean? No It Isn't.

By Peter Abertoning

An extremely important factor for your health is you diet, and this includes what you drink. A vital factor in your health is the cleanliness of the water you drink, and most Americans aren't drinking clean drinking water if it comes from the tap.

Clean drinking water is essential for good health. Right now you may be reading about the Cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe. Cholera and many other diseases can be spread by contaminated drinking water, and it's essential that we drink the purest water to protect our health.

We're lucky in the US, we don't have to combat cholera. But Cholera isn't the only contaminant that can be found in our water, there are hundreds or even thousands of contaminants that are routinely in our water, and no effort is made to remove them.

Consider this. I'm sure you know how serious it is to get lead into our bodies. None other than the EPA has stated that lead in drinking water is the number one environmental health threat to our childrens health. Low levels of lead can cause serious 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 says that there is no level of lead in water that is safe, 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.

So what is there that you can do to protect yourself and your family from drinking contaminated water? How do you make sure you're drinking clean water? How about bottled water?

And none other than the FDA has said "Companies that market bottled water as being safer than tap water are defrauding the American public." The reason is that the government doesn't set any standards for bottled water, so there is no requirement that bottled water be any better than tap water. Some bottled water is tap water put into a bottle, at a staggering price. Bottled water is a con.

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.

Here's an example. Did you know there was bromochloroacentontrile in your tap water? Never heard of it? What in the world is it? How dangerous is it? It doesn't matter if you use the best water filter you know that 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.

About the Author:

No comments: