Got water?

Water is everywhere so people tend to take it for granted. Approximately 70% of the earth’s surface is covered by water, and the human body is made up of about the same percentage. Naturally this means you need to keep your body hydrated on a daily basis with good clean drinking water. By drinking beverages such as soda that are full of ingredients other than water you are just making your body do extra work to get what it really needs.

In some parts of the world people are lucky to have any clean drinking water at all, much less water to bathe or cook with. Here in the good old USA water flows freely, which means many people use and unfortunately waste it without an afterthought. This easy access to the world’s most important resource has led Americans and residents of other first world countries to take water for granted. It was only recently that those same people began to question the purity of water that comes out of their tap. That is when the bottled water craze began.

Some of you might think drinking bottled water is a good solution, but I’d argue against that notion. Plastic bottles are clogging up our landfills, and it has been exposed that most bottled water is merely tap water or filtered water given a fancy name with a high price. If you do drink bottled water you should use your own reusable bottle that is BPA-free (you can get these at REI), and fill it with filtered water from home or work. Using your own water bottle or mug can save several paper or styrofoam cups every day.

So if bottled water isn’t the answer then what is? Let me tell you a little story that led to my path of clean water enlightenment. Many years ago, in a previous life I lived in Dallas, Texas. During these years I was more worried about what was in my beer than in my water, but one day I had a water revelation. I was playing tennis on a hot summer day and couldn’t help but notice that I wreaked of chlorine smell. I began to notice this after any activity where I sweat profusely, which in Texas can be something as simple as walking out to your car since temperatures often get into triple digits during the summer. All of this sweating of course means you have to drink a lot of water to rehydrate. The tap water where I lived in Texas was really poor quality, so bad that you could smell the chlorine in it when turning on the faucet. It only makes sense that if you drink this chlorinated water your body has to work overtime to purge your system of the chlorine.

Chlorine is a poisonous gas/liquid that is sometimes used to kill bacteria in water. You can read more about Chlorine at this web page from the CDC Chlorine Facts Page. My question is “if it is poisonous enough to kill you then why would you even want to intake it in small quantities, and wouldn’t that cause your body a lot of damage over years of exposure?” I took the first step to solving this problem by buying a cheap Brita filter from Wal-mart which did help a lot, but it still wasn’t quite enough.

When I moved to Colorado I found a local filtered water place called Water To Go  (also in Oregon) where you can bring in your 5 gallon (or whatever sized) jugs and fill them up for about 40 cents per gallon. They run their water through a 12 stage filtration system so it basically comes out completely purified. You can really taste the difference, or should I say not taste all the things that shouldn’t be there.

I know there are over the counter water filters that you can install in your sink and I think those are an excellent choice too, but usually pricey for the good ones. Currently we still fill our bottles at Water To Go, or Whole Foods Market. In the future we might get a home filter installed so we can have filtered water for all of our cooking and other needs.

Additionally we put a filter on our shower head from a company called Rainshow’r that filters out chlorine in the shower so it doesn’t dry out your skin. I immediately noticed a difference from this too. Previously my skin was always dry and sometimes itchy. When you take a hot shower your pores open up allowing your skin to become more vulnerable to absorbing harmful chlorine and other contaminants.

Whether or not you think using a filter on your shower head is a worthwhile practice is up to you, but drinking filtered water is a clear choice that everyone should consider. Everything you put in your body must be purged at some point; if it isn’t then it is unnaturally building up in your body which is likely to lead to bad news down the road. As with anything there are plenty of arguments on both sides of this issue. I’d recommend that you do your own research and decide for yourself if you think your water source is clean and safe, or if there is something funny in the water.