Have you noticed that home water purifiers are becoming a common part of our living?
It’s because people are increasingly questioning the quality of our drinking water.
I know. It didn’t used to be like that. But this is not the 1950s when the countryside around our cities was closer and more green. When life was simple and natural. With global warming and the reckless use of chemicals on our farmlands, water quality is an issue these days. You can even taste it when you drink from a faucet!
It’s not just in the US that people have problems with water quality and purity. It’s thought more than one third of the world’s population suffer from water shortages. They have one kind of problem. And where there is water, there are other problems and in attempting to fix them it is estimated around $400 billion are spent each year may loc nuoc gia dinh sawa.
As part of this, water purifiers is a massive industry and will only get bigger. At the industrial level China alone has budgeted to spend $125 billion on water treatment and recycling over the next five years. In the US it’s thought the replacement of the aging community infrastructure over the next 20 years will be as high as $1 trillion.
In spite of the huge sums spent at the government level on water, US water purity controls are not always high enough to guarantee that what comes from the faucet meets standards.
Take tests for pesticides, for example. While there are more than 35,000 pesticides on the market, using any number of around 600 different chemical compounds, many of which have been shown to cause cancer and birth defects local community officials are required to test for only six of them.
If that is not alarming enough, national health standard guidelines for setting the acceptable level of toxins are based on adult water consumption. Our children’s capacity and consumption patterns are not required to be part of the considerations. What’s more official standards are written assuming we get exploded to toxins just one at a time. Obviously this is not what happens in real life. And where standards call for the factoring in of exposure, they do not call for considerations of exposure to toxins over time.
For an example of this we only have to look to a report from the influential and exacting Environmental Working Group. It found that the weed killer trained (a highly toxic compound) is in the tap water of just under 800 communities through the Midwest. It also reported that government officials had underestimated exposure to it by 15 times for infants fed formula mixed with tap water. Admittedly this dramatic report was released in 1999, but the trends and casual implementation of health strategies for our drinking water will have changed little since then.
Like another example? What about the outbreaks of chlorine resistant parasites in many city water supplies? In Milwaukee recently hospitals and doctors counted 400,000 people who fell ill in one month — 100 of whom actually died! — due exactly to this. And on top of this consider that the chlorine and fluoride that treat many municipal water supplies are toxic and have to be used with great care. Actually, better not used at all, a chlorine has been linked directly to childhood asthma and fluoride to an increase risk of some cancers.
In other words, I get the distinct sense that the government’s standards are woefully inadequate. Which explains the bad taste in so much of the country’s drinking water. And the spread of home water purifiers.
It also explains the increased use of home water purifiers.
Bottled water is an option in some people’s minds. It is more expensive than simply using a good filter, but seems at a first glance to be easier to set up. (what’s more simple than unscrewing a bottle!) However a rigorous four-year study of bottled water by researchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council found of “103 brands surveyed, one-third contained levels of contamination.” this is not an option I’d choose unless I could be sure the water at my supermarket actually was as good as a home water purifier.
There are plenty of makes on the market. When you do your research and begin to compare home water purifiers you’ll notice the best purifiers fall into two types. That they use one of two different systems.
There is filtration and there is reverse osmosis. My family successfully used a filtration purifier in two developing countries for 14 years. But I would have to admit that on a casual inspection the reverse osmosis system looks pretty good. It is good at one thing. At removing everything in the water. But that means both the nasty chemicals government officials let slip out the faucet, as well as nature’s rich blend of trace minerals. These natural minerals give water in different places its distinctive taste and sweetness. And our bodies need many of these trace elements.
Take magnesium. It lifts a lot of the load as we metabolize sodium, potassium, and calcium. It acts on our heart and blood vessels, nerves, muscles and intestines. So calcium deficiency is related to low magnesium levels. Unlike calcium, there are no reserves in human bones to draw on if supplies of magnesium get low. But also unlike calcium, you cannot get too much. See how complex this is? See how much we depend on getting outside traces of magnesium into our bodies? So why would I give my family water with all trace elements removed by the home water purifier?