Every creature in creation is mostly water. Three-quarters of your brain is water. Your muscles are 70 percent water. Your blood is 82% water. Even your bones are a quarter water. Almost all your biochemical function can only take place in water. The most important component of your body is plain H-20.
We all know that, more or less, ever since we were kids.
The quality of your muscles, bones, organs and brain, their function, their resistance to injury and disease, and their longevity, is absolutely dependent on the purity of the water that you drink.
Unfortunately pure water has become a rare commodity. It’s also been bottled, marketed and sold at exhorbitant prices, often when it is often no more than filtered tap water. Did you really think that Perrier “Bottled at Source” meant that it came out of the earth naturally bubbling. Nah, it comes out flat and they carbonate it, don’t they?
Then there’s all the kinds of nonsense foisted upon us by smart marketers, the genuinely misinformed and then of course the ubiquitous MLM-ers flogging us all kinds of filtration machines.
Let’s take a look at the facts, shall we?
Pure Well Water - Where?
Many people still have private well water. They like to think this spring-fed water is cleaner than tap water, because it doesn’t go through any treatment system. It ‘s not treated with chemicals such as aluminum and chlorine. But infectious and parasitic diseases are still the principal cause of death and illness throughout the world, primarily because of poor water quality, particularly in the tropics. In 1997, diarrhea was ranked first in the world as a cause of illness and sixth as a cause of death. Diarrhea is caused mainly by contaminated water.
Like commercial water supplies, most well water is also contaminated with man-made toxins. All drinking water, including well or spring water is derived either from surface waters or groundwater. Water from either source is rarely pure. Increasing industrialization and urbanization, which inevitably spawn toxic dump sites, together with intensified agriculture, which contaminates water with fertilizers and pesticides, has effectively eliminated the pure water supply. In addition, we have all the microbes of civilization that breed happily in your water supply if not treated. To drink well or spring water without having it tested for contaminants on a regular basis, is playing Russian roulette.
Municipal Water Is Not Clean
Modern treatment methods have reduced the possibility of bacterial or viral infections being transmitted in municipal drinking water. But most of the systems even in America are now overwhelmed by demand. Waterborne microbial outbreaks have been reported in communities with even the best systems of water quality control. One of the most notorious outbreaks happened in Wisconsin in 1993. Contaminated water supplies caused a widespread outbreak of gastrointestinal illness, mainly attributable to Cryptosporidium. This outbreak affected more than 400,000 people.
A big problem is that chlorination does not eliminate all waterborne disease. Some pathogens are hard to kill. These include the Norwalk virus, hepatitis A, Giardia and Cryptosporidium. Even Canada with more water per acre than any other developed country, and a tiny population, cannot contain the infection problem. Representative studies conducted in Quebec, found that up to 40% of gastroenteritis was associated with tap water. Remember, this water was meeting public health standards for water treatment.
Health authorities are very aware of these problems, and there is endless debate North America and Europe about the urgent need for stricter water quality control and additional water treatment. Though debate rages, little has been accomplished. If you drink tap water you continually risk disease.
To add to your health burden, by-products of chlorine itself causes illness, including cancer. During the chlorination of drinking water, a complex mixture of by-products forms from chlorine and the organic and inorganic compounds present in raw water, including several known carcinogens. Gastrointestinal cancer and urinary tract cancer are strongly linked to chlorination.
Researchers found that 15% of bladder cancers in Ontario may be caused by drinking water containing relatively high levels of chlorination by-products. A report by the Center for Disease Control in Canada, admits that the risk of bladder cancer from drinking water is an important public health problem.
Arsenic is another major water contaminant widespread in the water supply. This is a problem for both untreated water and municipal water. Arsenic is very difficult to eliminate from water using conventional methods. Arsenic in drinking water is a recognized cause of cancer of the skin, lung and bladder.
Quest For Clean Water
So what are the alternatives? The bottled water industry is booming. But many of these products are simply tap water passed through conditioning filters such as charcoal, which eliminate some of the chlorine and unpleasant tastes and odors. These filters do not remove the toxins.
What about “spring” water? Brands labeled “Spring Water” legally have to be from a spring, unless the words are a brand name, or part of a brand name. Then they are just tap water. Spring water, however, is just untreated groundwater. Whatever goes into the surrounding ground ends up in the spring water. Today, spring water is no more pure than well water.
Springs also contain all kinds of organic matter and often some very toxic minerals. A test of the well known bottled Appollinaris spring water imported from West Germany, showed excessive levels of selenium and cobalt, and a level of arsenic that exceeded the EPA standards by 6000 percent. The purity of bottled water is a figment of the greedy imaginations of the folks who profit from it.
The only reliable bottled water is distilled water.
Virtually everything is removed by steam distillation, leaving almost pure H20. And because distilled water is often used for medical purposes, the companies that produce it have more rigorous standards.
Bottled distilled water, however, is very costly. An excellent alternative and a potent anti-cancer strategy is to put in your own purification system to clean your tap or well water for drinking and cooking. Increasingly over the past two decade people who know this are now having whole house distillation systems installed that clean all water entering the house. Now that’s clean!
For most people a whole-house system is not a practical solution. But there are many good systems available that install in or near your kitchen that provide plenty of clean water for your family. Simple charcoal filters will not do. These do not remove the majority of contaminants. A good reverse osmosis unit that is serviced regularly will bring your water down to between 40-50 parts per million of dissolved solids. This is reasonable when you consider that most tap water is 300 - 600 parts per million of dissolved solids.
By far the best system, however, is a home distiller, which also incorporates a solvent vent that vents outside the house. There are excellent products available that are no more trouble to service than your washing machine. A good distiller will clean your water so that it is between 0-12 parts per million of dissolved solids.
Beware Horse Ordure.....!
Some folks object to this purity, complaining that the very emptiness of distilled water causes it to leach minerals from the body. There have been many articles making these claims recently. Most of these are written by people selling alternative water cleaning systems such as reverse osmosis systems. This is just so much bull. Anyone with a basic understanding of biochemistry will tell you that it is impossible for water to leach minerals from your body. As soon as you drink it, water becomes a soupy mixture with all the contents of your gut. On absorption through the intestinal wall, the mixture immediately blends with your body fluids and becomes part of you. There is no physiological way it can suck minerals out.
Other folk claim that you are missing your minerals by not getting them from your water. Don’t be fooled, it’s a con. Most of the minerals in water we need we get concentrated in the food we eat that is grown on these mineral enriched soils. If we were to rely on the minuscule amount of minerals in water for our minerals, we would all be in a bad way. And, as I keep saying, minerals are depleted in our foods, so anyone with sense is taking a daily mineral supplement.
It is the fruits, vegetables and grains that take up the minerals and concentrate them sufficiently to provide our mineral requirements. Dr. Eric Underwood, a world expert on minerals in food, states it plainly, “Plant materials provide the main source of minerals to animals and to most members of the human race.” Drink and cook with water as pure H20, and put another tick on your cancer prevention program.
Another myth generated by dubious marketers is that distilled water absorbs carbon dioxide making it acidic. The only “bubbly” water I see is usually in a bottle of Perrier or San Pellegrino. I can leave my glass of distilled water sitting by my computer desk and it does not start to “consume” carbon dioxide and change its chemistry. Distilled water is not some kind of magnet that suddenly sucks in carbon dioxide from the air. If it did, all water would. To make Perrier or soda “bubble” the carbon dioxide is forced into it. And as we all know, leave your Perrier sitting open and it is not long before that carbon dioxide has all disappeared leaving you with still water. Distilled water or pure H-20 also has a neutral pH. It is not acidic at all, it is non-reactive and this is why it is used in research and in hospitals.
Anyone who still bugs you about this or won’t accept the truth of it, just refer them to The National Library of Medicine “Medline” archive, which is open to anyone with access to the internet. It is free and you can look up all the VALID scientific studies you wish. You will find none about the supposed toxic effects of distilled water.
