Does your water contain a bunch of harmful chemicals?

I once heard that collecting your own drinking water from a natural spring in glass containers was the best drinking water you can get.

I’ve also heard of some extremely powerful, multi-stage filters that clean the water, then remineralize it, and basically turn it into magic.

Not sure which is better, but I know many people aren’t willing to travel to a spring or invest in a filtration system.

A simple first step you can take to improve your water quality is to put a better filter in your fridge. It’s a step in the right direction.

The National Sanitation Foundation and the American National Standards Institute (NSF/ANSI) put ratings on water filters.

Most are NSF/ANSI 42. This standard refers to “aesthetic effects” and will reduce taste and odor of chlorine, as well as some major dissolved solids.

NSF/ANSI 53 is a different rating that refers to “health effects” and reduces a whole lot more than taste and odor. Depending on the brand and filter, it works to reduce or remove up to 50 different contaminants from your water like lead, cryptosporidium, VOCs, and chromuim.

NSF/ANSI 401 gets really deep and can remove dissolved prescription drugs, medications, herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals.

What about Reverse Osmosis? Many claim it is the ultimate in water purification. While it is powerful, there are some potential drawbacks. One is wasted water: most RO systems used three or four gallons of water to produce one purified gallon. Still, this may be a worthy sacrifice when it comes to drinking water.

RO may also allow most organic compounds, bacterial microorganisms, chlorine by-products, or dissolved gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and radon to slip through.

The best RO systems address many of these concerns by including a pre-filter for large particles, an activated carbon pre-filter, and a post-filtration that may include a remineralization cartridge, a UV disinfection system, and a 0.22 to 0.45 micron (submicron) filter.

There are concerns about RO stripping all the minerals out of your water… but how important are the minerals in the water we drink? Some argue that such a small portion of our mineral needs are met through water, that it makes no sense to be overly concerned about keeping them in. Why leave proven or potentially dangerous chemicals in the water to get a tiny percentage of your minerals in? Others argue further that we absorb minerals from our water too poorly for it to many anyway. On the other hand, some suggest that demineralized water actually draws minerals out of your cells—worse than missing out on the minerals, you are losing them.

Who’s right? What do you do? A multistage RO system as described above is probably close to as good as it gets, but I still have mixed feelings about a remineralization cartridge. It feels like your water purification system is a supplement company deciding your mineral dosages.

Personally, I make sure most of my drinking water is at least up to NSF 42 and 53 standards, and I try to eat a widely varied diet providing a dense array of nutrients.

Is this enough? Well, I’ve heard this warning making the rounds recently: During a 10-minute shower in unfiltered water, you absorb 8 drinking glasses worth of water. Most of it seems to comes from a combination of the hot water opening up your pores and the steam vaporizing the contents of the water.

Well, that’s a bummer, isn’t it?

In fact, most of the studies and evidence around this topic indicate that showers probably account for more of the containments that enter our system than our drinking water.

A cold shower would probably reduce most of those problems, but it’s just barely alarming enough for me to recommend a shower filter. I use one from AquaBliss on Amazon. At the time of writing this, it’s about $35, with a $16 filter change once or twice per year, depending on your household shower rates.

As with most things, you could find a way to worry yourself out of existence in regards to just about anything. But the antidote to over-worry is not reckless disregard. Each of us must do their own pondering to decide what are reasonable steps for their specific situation. I personally find that I can take pretty good steps towards improving my water quality for about $75 per year, and that seems like a reasonable response to the data at hand. You may be comfortable with more or less. In any case, I hope you are now a little more informed for the decision.

There are lots of other steps you can take for your health and overall disease resistance, too. Chief among them eating more nutrition foods, sleeping better, managing your stress, and exercising. If you are interested in an online health and fitness coach to help you slowly and surely build habits in an easy way, feel free to read more about my program here or to apply for a consultation here.