Originally posted by: boomerang
I really don't understand why people get so uptight about the water they drink. I feel a lot of has to do with marketing. Bottled water, water filtration systems, etc., etc.
It's water, drink it.
Originally posted by: loki8481
28 years of drinking tap water in various cities in various parts of the country and no problems to report.
my parents gave me fluoride as a kid... I credit the health of my teeth to it. I've also never had a cavity.
I can't keep quiet about this so I will try to keep it educational for the uninformed.
Drinking water is not just simply H2O. Natural drinking water has dissolved minerals in it, called total dissolved solids (TDS). Your body needs this to process the and utilize the water. Also in healthy water there are microscopic microorganisms that are beneficial for us to consume that promote the good bacteria in your gut. Try drinking some deionized water which you can get at the drug store for a year and see how you feel. It will leach the minerals from your body and hey, you get to enjoy some cracked teeth or osteoporosis down the road. So if you filter your water, add a pinch of sea salt to the pitcher to get some minerals in it. Especially if you filter with reverse osmosis. Brita and Pur probably don't take out too much TDS.
Chlorinated water kills the potentially bad bacteria, but also can kill the good bacteria in your gut, so it's a question of which tradeoff you prefer. You can at least let the chlorine air out of the water before drinking it.
My main thesis about the human body is that it is very adaptable. So I'm not saying drinking tap water is bad for you. If it's what you drink every day you will survive. You probably won't get any problems related to the water your whole life because you adapt to it. Try moving to India and see if you can handle the public water then.
The point isn't that crappy water causes disease specifically, but that great water encourages life and vitality.
Just try this experiment if you're a water drinker who drinks a lot of tap water. Go get a bottle of Fiji from the store and compare how it tastes. It's loaded with TDS and has a balanced pH. It tastes great.
I have been drinking great spring water (since I have a local spring) for a year and I don't notice it until I drink a glass of tap water. It feels foul, and my body sometimes gives me a stomach ache with it. So It's simple for me, I drink water that feels good to me. I put 6 liters a day down. If you try drinking spring water for a year I bet you'll notice a difference.
Now on to fluoridated water preventing cavities. Fluoride hardens teeth it's a fact, you can get treatments from the dentists and take it in all forms. I personally believe the 1ppm in our drinking water is just a game of statistics trying to prove if it prevents cavities or not. These studies are just statistics and don't chemically analyze teeth. I just follow the money and realize the fertilizer and chemical companies get paid to dump their literally toxic waste in our water supplies. I want a choice to be medicated with fluoride, so I don't like it. It is the same thing as rat poison and if there is any risk I don't want it, it's my health, my choice.
People from native tribes that don't get corrupted by white man never get cavities. Most people never got cavities until we colonized the New World (Americas) and started consuming loads of white sugar. It literally caused a pandemic of cavities. They hadn't seen this before. And then when Europe produced the sugar beet (to avoid paying tax on sugar from cane) in the 1800s again it was a pandemic.
So when you think of an old west cowboy with a cavity, it's from too much sugar, which would also come from the whiskey. Alcohol is basically pure sugar as well.
The enzymes in the human mouth can handle any natural food you throw at it and no one really had cavity problems until we had processed foods (starting with sugar).
Flouride treats the symptom but doesn't address the cause. No one even looks at history to see why we all get cavities now and it gets so ignorant that people start assuming they have a fluoride deficiency. Don't drink soda, avoid lots of sweets and brush your teeth and you probably won't get a cavity.
And there are so many alternatives to Fluoride like Xylitol, but I'll stop and just won;t get into that.
One last note about water: drink room temperature. It is optimal for hydration. Hot water warms you up. Cold water cools you down. Room temp water hydrates you best. Adding some lemon juice to the water also improves hydration.
drink up!