On the residential detox courses I use a reverse osmosis table top filter for all the water on the course whether it be for drinking or for cooking. Yes! My valiant expert staff have to eat. Years ago I wrote a a three page article for What Doctors Don’t Tell You headed ‘Water not a drop to drink’ and since then the water situation has only got worse in the UK.
Bottled Water Doesn’t Mean Safe
A lot of my patients know this and protest they use bottled water for everything but all bottled water contains heavy metals, radioactive isotopes, caffeine, chlorine, pharmaceuticals, plasticisers and propellants. Can I hear cries of how can this be? You thought it came out all sparkling clear from mountain springs and glaciers didn’t you? Well Viche St Yorre and Badois contain higher concentrations of fluoride than 1ppm, the recommended lowest level. A report done by Which? in 1989 found that many brands contain more bacteria than tap water, and remember the Perrier scandal? Researchers testing the water quality of commercial bottled waters at the University of Missouri found one brand triggered a 78% increase in the growth of breast cancer cells compared to control samples used.
BPA plastic
This is a notorious endocrine disruptor and many companies have have stopped using it but one of the alternatives polyethylene terephthalate also poses cancer risks. If reused they can leach chemicals like DHEA and BBP which are both endocrine disruptors. And I haven’t even raised the environmental price! On average it takes 3 litres of water to produce one litre of water and 17 million barrels of oil for the production of bottled water in one year in the US. You know where it goes….into landfill and oceans.
Tap water
You probably already know that nitrates from artificial fertilisers , lead, aluminium, chlorine, chloramines and often flouride go into our water but did you know that both chemical drugs and street drugs do through human urine? They cannot be filtered out by the standard techniques of chlorination or sand filtration. Yikes! Bang goes the slogan ‘just say no to drugs’. In Lake Maggiore, for example, recent testing detected carbamazepine, sulphamethoxazole, gemfibrozil, benzafibrate and hosts of herbicides and surfacants.
The Solution
For me it’s Reverse Osmosis hands down with a filter plumbed beneath my sink and a stand alone Counter top one when I travel. It takes out parasites, cysts, viruses, bacteria, heavy metals, chloride, fluoride, but it does remove some of the natural minerals from the water. Eating and drinking your fruits and vegetables makes up for this.
Spring water captured at the source in a glass bottle is even better but please make sure the source has been thoroughly tested to avoid contamination.
