--- In morelife@yahoogroups.com, "Erich Brueschke"
<erich_brueschke@...> wrote:
>
> Hope you both are well.
>
> I read the following article and was wondering if this might make you
> both reconsider drinking municipal water as you do. (by municipal I
> mean non-distilled or water that is not specially treated to make it
> very pure)

[The above lead me to reexamine the MoreLife.org personal health page where our
beverages are described. http://morelife.org/personal/health/beveragesetc.html
I quickly found that there is no mention there of our reverse osmosis and
charcoal filter practice. I will be correcting this. However Paul did describe
our usage of reverse osmosis at sci.life-extension in Jan 2007 -
http://tinyurl.com/23vv6e He's pretty certain that he also did this back at the
LEF Forums when he was the moderator before early January 2002. **Kitty]


> http://tinyurl.com/ytegrw
>
> I have always considered this a small risk, but one that is easily
> avoidable by drinking distilled water, but after reading this article,
> I am glad that I have only consumed distilled water for the past 20
years.
>
> I have no proof that doing so has any advantages, but probably might
> be safer in the long run then consuming water from municipal sources.
>
> Erich
>
> [Thanks for the post and thoughts, Erich.
> Here is a related link:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-10-cities-water_N.htm
>
> We will comment in a reply. --Paul]

I think that the crux of the matter is that as the article
stated, the concentrations "far below the levels of a medical dose".
Also with respect to animal studies, these are mostly relate to
animals that are living immersed in the water rather than just
drinking it, and they are also living in water that has directly
flowed off feed lots and such rather than been naturally filtered by
going through the ground into wells. Instead, it would be far better
to test the effects on fish living in home and municipal aquariums.

I read the AP article in its entirety and consider it to be effectively
a highly biased "swamp job". Almost every paragraph of the article
could have a logically opposing counter statement, and to be impartial
these should have been supplied. It would actually be a good test of
analytical thinking/writing for MoreLife Yahoo readers to quote
paragraphs from the article and give such a counter argument.

I am much more concerned about the chlorination and fluoridation of
municipal drinking waters and the fact that for most large cities the
water comes from surface streams and reservoirs. In addition, there
are likely many local naturally occurring chemical toxins that are
not even being tested for, and perhaps not even known. These are all
reasons why I have for many years been drinking water that has gone
through a combined reverse osmosis and charcoal filter, which I began
when living in Toronto where the water was not the best in my estimation.

Note: the paragraph from the AP story:

"One technology, reverse osmosis, removes virtually all pharmaceutical
contaminants but is very expensive for large-scale use and leaves
several gallons of polluted water for every one that is made drinkable."

We do not waste the effluent water from the reverse osmosis process
(which can be anywhere from 4 to 8 gallons per gallon of product
water depending on the condition of the filtering apparatus), but use
it for watering the trees on our Casa Grande property, supplementing
the regular watering system.

Since leaving Toronto, when in Canada we do not use the filter as our
drinking water comes directly from a spring which is over 30 miles
and many intervening lakes from even a town of any size. The spring
source is also uphill from any of the cottages on the nearby lakes
into which some effluent from cottage septic systems might creep. In
fact the spring is from the hillside of hills which are at a higher
elevation than any habitation for dozens of miles around.

In Casa Grande our water comes from groundwater via Arizona Water
Company wells located throughout the central portion of the Casa
Grande valley area. (For those interested, the latest water quality
report - http://www.azwater.com/ccr2006-casagrande.pdf It's nearing
time for the 2007 report to be issued.) In contrast, in Phoenix more
than 90 percent of the water comes from the Salt, Verde or Colorado
rivers. None of the AZ Water Co wells for Casa Grande are located near
the town's water treatment facility, but we run the water through the
filtering process just to be sure. For the two of us the filtering
process costs less per gallon even with filter element replacements,
than would be the cost of distilled water and we still get some of the
trace minerals left in the water.

We also drink very little juice, so any contamination of that due to
reconstitution with municipal water would not affect us much. And for
all cooking we use the same water as for drinking, because we use
minimal water to cook and we drink all cooking water. Even for soaking
beans we use our filtered water, even though the remaining water from
the first soak is discarded because of the anti-digestive enzymes it
contains.

Finally, most our fluid intake is in the form of tea, and likely
boiling the water destroys many of those drug contaminants.

--Paul

[To make it clear that we're not fanatical about the filtered water usage, we do
*not* take our own water into restaurants or dance clubs. There we drink the
provided water directly, and in restaurants get local water in the soups, coffee
and tea. (This also includes when on our cross country trips.) I would expect
that Erich does the same when he is in restaurants and the like.

Someone who was insistent on *always* drinking only filtered (or distilled in
Erich's case) water, would have to also eliminate all juices from concentrates
unless s/he had determined that only filtered/distilled water was used by the
company. The ~3 oz of wine that we each have daily contains water from the
originating source - usually South America, but sometimes California - and when
in Canada often France or Italy.

My estimate of the amount of our total water intake in all forms that is not
osmosis filtered is less than 3%, when considering that the vast majority of our
intake is done at home or with water and tea taken with us elsewhere. **Kitty]