You Have a Right to Clean Drinking Water – But You Probably Don’t Have It
By Peter Alderton
One of the most important factors in the health of any person is their diet, and diet includes water. Despite the fact that you ought to be drinking clean drinking water the majority of Americans aren’t.
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.
Just because there is no Cholera in the US doesn’t mean we have clean water. There is a multitude of contaminants in our drinking water, and although they won’t kill us as fast as Cholera, they can still, over time, add up to impact seriously on our health.
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 is the number one environmental health threat to our children’s 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 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 actually enters our water somewhere in the house.
The EPA recognizes 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.
So what do you do to make sure that you and your family have clean water to drink? How do you get the purest drinking water possible? Should you buy bottled water, for instance?
The FDA says that “Companies that market bottled water as being safer than tap water are defrauding the American public.” That’s because there is simply no government regulation requiring bottled water to be safer than tap water. And studies have even shown that some bottled water is just tap water. And you pay more for bottled water, for the same quantity, than you do for gas.
And bottled water is an environmental disaster, with countless plastic bottles manufactured to go into landfill.
So if bottled water isn’t the answer to clean drinking water what do you do if the thought of drinking lead and countless other contaminants repulses you? You find a good filter to use. A water filter is much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than bottled water and produces water to extremely high standards of cleanliness. A high quality filter will filter the lead out, along with the other contaminants, including chlorine, that you find in your tap water.
How can you be sure? Because the best drinking water filters are tested to rigorous standards by independent bodies that make sure that the results that are claimed are actually achieved. If you look at the data for the best water filters you can see every contaminant listed, and before filtering and after filtering levels stated. The best filters are achieving filtering levels above 97% for just about all serious contaminants, including some you’ve probably never heard of.
For example did you know that there can be bromochloroacentontrile in your tap water? What is it? How dangerous is it? Well it really doesn’t matter because if you use the best drinking water filter available you know that 97% of it is removed.
So if you’re beginning to get worried about contaminants in your drinking water like lead, you have good reason. You have a right to clean drinking water, but you won’t get it from the faucet. To get seriously clean drinking water you need to use the best filter possible.
And believe it or not, the best filter isn’t always the most expensive filter.
