Pure, clean water for drinking and bathing is a necessity for getting and staying healthy. Don’t delay starting to drink pure, life-giving water. A quality water-purification system is one of the best investments you can make for the health and well-being of your family.

Don’t settle for a grocery-store pitcher fitted with a filter through which you simply pour water. These filters generally im-prove the taste and smell of tap water but accomplish little else. Instead find a purification system that removes dangerous chemi-cals, bacteria, cysts, and viruses. Make sure it will not breed bacte-ria or other disease-causing organisms.

You may opt for a whole-house purification system. If not, consider getting a showerhead filter that effectively removes chlorine. Aside from alleviating the risk of inhaling chloroform gas, your shower filter will offer relief from dry, itchy skin.

Any reputable company will be able to provide you with do-cumentation of its system’s capabilities. Look in your telephone directory’s business listings for water-purification specialists who can help you determine your purification needs.

Every year, industry and the private citizens release 18 billion pounds of new pollutants and chemicals into the atmosphere, soil, and surface and groundwater. Were you able to take in those mind-boggling statistics? I said 18 billion pounds of pollutants and chemicals. Many of these toxins poison our drinking water.

Both tap water and bottled water come from surface and groundwater sources. Surface sources include rivers, lakes, streams, ponds, reservoirs, springs, and wells. We would never drink water from a lake or stream because we know it is very likely contaminated. Groundwater created from rain, snow, sleet, and hail soaks into the ground.

Many public water systems use under-ground aquifers as opposed to surface water, and so many people think their water is safe. An aquifer is a layer of water-bearing permeable rock, clay, gravel, sand, or silt. Pumped into wells from the aquifer, now the water is accessible for drinking or agricultural purposes. Spring runoff containing residue from pesticides, ferti-lizers, industrial chemical wastes, herbicides, and other contami-nants frequently makes its way into these aquifer reservoirs.

Articles about unsafe drinking water appear daily in the nation’s newspapers, on TV, and in magazines. Most of us want to believe the affected areas are far away. Here’s the truth: water safety and pollution are global issues.

The world’s drinking water is unsafe at every source! Worldwide, over a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and estimates project this figure will increase to 2.3 billion by 2025. A staggering 3.4 million people die yearly from contaminated-water-related diseases and poisoning.

Many people respond to those statistics with, “That’s tragic, but it’s happening in India, right? And Africa? Our own water supply here in the US of A is safe—isn’t that so?”

Think again. Today I went online for information about contaminated water in the United States, and the search engine returned thousands of articles! Even when our water is chemically treated, ostensibly to make it safe to drink, it often passes through leaky, disintegrating water mains and pipes in our cities and homes. At any given moment a dangerous chemical, bacteria, or parasite could infiltrate our water supply.

Filter Water Facts Revisited

“Water water everywhere not a drop to drink…” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Filter Water Hypothesis

If you watch television, read the newspaper, or get your current events from the Internet, you are well aware of the escalating and accelerating wave of violence, gang warfare, pervasive restlessness, mental illness, suicide, and proliferation of immune-depressive diseases. Why is society suddenly plagued by all these problems?

Contamination Galore

Many researchers correctly hypothesize that a significant number of these problems stem from chemical poisoning mostly due to a marked absence of clean and filter water.   We drink water and consume food laced with toxic chemicals such as:

• Herbicides
• Pesticides
• Hormones
• Steroids
• Antibiotics
• Preservatives

These poisons pose a very real threat to our health. How often do you hear of someone who has died of old age? It’s shocking, is it not, that relatively few people seem to live long enough to die of natural causes.

Try filter  water as much as possible before drinking it to remain strong and healthy and check with your local EPA to see how you can help prevent chemical imbalances in the water systems.

Water Pollution beyond the Surface

How is it that all of these toxins get into our water systems in the first place?  Underground storage tanks will eventually spring leaks, as they are unfortunately not built to last forever.  Tap water may come originally from sources that have been contaminated by industrial, agricultural and household waste.  Water will travel through old pipes sometimes, only adding to the plethora of chemicals. Medical waste does not have its own landfill and may be seeping into our water, as well as run off from pesticides. Chlorine was added in 1913 after the advent of the industrial revolution to try to stave off some of these chemicals, and the wastewater treatment plants use it today.  Unfortunately, that is not enough to take care of everything in the 21st century.

Filter Water Reduces Mineral Toxicity

Minerals are also overabundant in our drinking water.  This causes hard water and can clog up pipes and equipment that is run by hydraulics.  These minerals include calcium, magnesium, iron, and copper.  Our bodies are not able to digest these minerals any better than they can the chemicals in the water.

Bottled Water isn’t Filter Water

When you are thinking of drinking bottled water to help your health, be aware that much of the bottled water doesn’t come from mountain springs at all, but rather tap water that has just gone through some extra filtration.  You can help your health by simply adding a filtration system in your own home.

So how much clean water should a person drink to avoid dehydration and to maintain optimal health? This is the subject of endless debate in the world of water. It takes in the further debated question of what counts as positive contribution to your body’s water needs and what doesn’t count or may even be counter productive? Is the drinking of coffee or of caffeinated soda and asset or a liability in meeting your body’s need for water? I take a fresh approach to this question under the topic of How Much Water to Drink…An Individualized Approach.

So assuming that we are drinking clean drinking water, let me turn to discussing drinking water benefits. The first kinds of benefits relate to the role of water as a basic building block for the body. Then we consider a totally different kind of health related benefits, those which water provides in enabling the body to function efficiently. Finally, we face the dangers to our health of dehydration or not drinking enough clean water.

Drinking Water Benefits for the Building of a Healthy Body
Did you know that about two thirds of the body is made up of water? I find it incredible to know that even my bones are 22% water. So there is this dimension of water as a building block for the body which I discuss under the title of The Body Building Benefits of Drinking Water. You will get a glimpse into water’s foundational role in the very structuring of your body.

Drinking Water Benefits for the Healthy Functioning of Body Systems
Water offers us a second kind of benefit which we discover when we examine the functioning of the body. Our bodies function sort of like a car with many systems. A car has a fuel system for getting the gas to the engine where it is exploded to run the car. It also has an exhaust system, a cooling system, etc. In like fashion, the body runs smoothly, or we could say healthily, when its various systems are functioning well. The body’s systems include such systems as the digestive system, the circulatory system, the waste removal system, etc. My discussion of the Health Benefits of Drinking Water…A Panoramic View spells out the critical role of water to the efficient running of each system. We also point out how these systems can break down with insufficient water or the wrong kind of water.

Drinking Water Benefits of Avoiding Dehydration
What exactly is dehydration and what happens when your body loses too much water? You will understand how we lose fluids and the symptoms that tell us we are dehydrated and how badly we are dehydrated. We discuss all this and how we fill up our water “tank” under the topic of Water Dehydration…What is it?

Now the subject of dehydration has a very dark side when we talk about the effects of repeated diarrhea on children under five in the wider world. Diarrhea can lead to severe dehydration and even death. Did you know that according to the World Health Organization (WHO): 3 million people a year still die from diarrheal complications, including 1.9 million children under five? This in spite of the fact that there is a rather simple and exciting solution that has been found that could greatly reduce those numbers. I discuss this critical subject under the title: Diarrhea and Dehydration… And… Let’s not go there.

But did you know that 1.1 billion people in the world still don’t have clean water available for them to drink? Here we are talking about one of the most basic of human needs. Providing them with this has got to be high on our agenda for the world. In the West, however, we have access to water which is substantially clean. Even here, my concern for myself and for you is that you be drinking the very best we can. Hence the value of studying and choosing and using the best of drinking water filters. When we have the possibility of drinking water that is almost 100% free of both organic and inorganic contaminants, why settle for less!