Tap Water
By now you would have to be living under a rock to not have heard that most tap water is riddled with contaminants and bares little to no semblance to its original counterpart. Some of the biggest culprits for ruining your tap water include fluoride, chlorine, and VOC’s (volatile organic compounds).- Increases cavities and bone fractures
- Creates behavioral problems and increases cancer death rates
- Bio-accumulates in your tissues and is often stored in the brain and thyroid which can cause fatigue, weakness, and lowering of IQ.
Last but not least, with industrial farming practices, VOC’s have also managed to leech into the public water supply, and have created another layer to water contamination.
Bottled Water
Bottled water seems innocent enough. If you have the choice between a soda or bottled water in the store, you would do yourself a favour by choosing the water.Not only that, but if your care about the earth you need to consider the amount of energy and resources placed into the production of plastic, and the way it is typically disposed of that does nothing to improve the health of this planet.
Reverse Osmosis Water
Once considered an exceptional option for drinking water, we are now finding out that for very logical reasons, that it really isn’t the best.Although reverse osmosis water does remove the typical contaminants in our tap water (as does distilled water), it also removes all the minerals contained in the water which ruins it’s nutritive effects, and lowers its natural alkalinity. Some water experts are referring to it as the ‘white flour’ of water, as it has been stripped of all its original health promoting properties.
Others believe than reverse osmosis water can have a dehydrating effect on your intestinal system as it pulls minerals from your intestinal lining to ’rehydrate' itself. If you have become constipated while drinking reverse osmosis water, that very well may be the reason.
Filtered Water
In this case, I’m referring to any water that has been put through a standard countertop filtration system. This may be a container or a system that attaches to your tap, whose primary responsibility is to just remove the contaminants found in your typical tap water.This is the primary system most people tend to gravitate towards when they decide to clean up their drinking water. It is very good for most people as it gets rid of most of the offending toxins, and does not strip all the minerals out of the water like a reverse osmosis or distilled water, for example.
However, you do need to do your due diligence to ensure it takes out most of the dangerous contaminants that could be in your tap water, as they are not all created equal.
Alkaline Water System
The alkaline water systems were held by many in recent years to be the holy grail of water consumption. Although they do have their benefits, you need to keep in mind that the pH of many of them is unnaturally high.So even though they do deliver exceptional active hydrogen and abundant colloidal mineral content, their use long term has a little asterisk beside it due to pH levels that often exceed 10, and can be as high as 12 or 13. This should not be considered healthy long term, even if the majority of the population is highly acidic. In contrast, natural spring water has a pH of around 8 to 8.5.
Spring Water
The purest, most original source of water, spring water has been largely forgotten about with the advent of bottled water and all the filtration systems that have hit the market. That, and people simply don’t want to spend much time acquiring one of our basic human necessities.How Much Water Do I Drink?
For most people, the answer to this simple question would be ’more than you are drinking now'. Most people are very deficient on their drinking water needs, and would have a hard time overdoing it.However, a simple, general benchmark is to consume at least half your body weight (in pounds), in clean drinking water (in ounces). So if you weigh 160 pounds, you would need 80 ounces (10 glasses) of water.
Much like the rest of our food supply, it’s generally not the original, pure source of food or water that is the problem, it’s what man has done to it for our ‘convenience’ and ‘well-being’.
Which water are you drinking?