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A Child Dies Every 20 Seconds From Unsafe Water

rob — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:42:25 +0000

My interests in water have expanded in the last couple of years from focusing primarily on ionization to including the importance of proper filtration. No matter how good ionized water is for you, if it is not clean, it is not as good as it could be.

We have lots of problems with our source water in Canada and the USA and the problems are only going to get worse. I have articles written about the hundreds of contaminants in our drinking water, hexavalent chromium, perchlorate, fluoride, and chloramines. I have even alerted people to the fact that the GOP appears intent on crushing the EPA in the name of business interests.

Water and Health

Drinking water doesn’t necessarily make you healthy, but not drinking water definitely hurts your health. Our bodies are 70% water, and yet so many of us almost ignore water when we think about health.

One of the antioxidant filter companies summarizes the importance of water on their website perfectly when they refer to water as: “the foundation for every biological, chemical and electrical process in our body, which makes it the most important variable of our health.

If water is so important to our health, why is it that so few people seem to care?

I’m always amazed how so few people care about their health. I assume that people believe that they are healthy as long as they don’t feel sick. Nothing could be further from the truth. The good news and the bad news is that our bodies are so amazing that they take many years to break down, despite the incredible abuse that we subject them to. Perhaps if our internal machinery were not such a miracle, people would pay more attention to what they put into their bodies.

Picking up a bottle of water while you are on the go seems like a good idea and is better than buying a soda or dehydrating. So, why don’t you drink water all the time? Is it because you crave the sugar in sodas or juices? Is it because you need the caffeine fix or the buzz from alcohol? Your body needs water and only water when it comes to beverages.

What About the Billion People Who Don’t Have Access to Safe Drinking Water?

The amazing people at water.org estimate that more than 3.5 million people die each year due to an inability to be able to obtain safe drinking water. To make matters worse, more than 84% of the fatalities occur in children. To put that in perspective, it would be like a Jumbo jet crashing every hour.

For more statistics about how contaminated water affects the human race, check out: http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/

When I read that a child dies every 20 seconds because of the inaccessibility to safe drinking water, it breaks my heart.

What can we do about this?

As an individual, it is hard to change the world…but you can help.

Scott Harrison was a New York night club and fashion event promoter. He became aware of the plight of a billion people around the world who were in danger of dying because of the unsafe water they were drinking when he took a gig as a photographer as a volunteer aboard a floating hospital with a group called Mercy Ships. Scott used his organizing skills to found an organization called charity water which you can find at www.charitywater.org. The most current information from the website indicates that they have funded 4,282 water projects around the world serving over 2 million people. The organization specializes in funding local infrastructure in affected communities, primarily in the form of drilling wells.

Bravo Scott…and all those that have joined and donated to his efforts. Please check out their website and think seriously about what you can do to help.

I have learned about another effort that is being organized to help provide safe drinking water to those in need. I hope that I will be able to participate in the project and I intend to help in any way that I can. It is too early to provide details of the people behind this effort and what they are going to be doing, but I promise to share details as soon as they allow.

The “Dirty Water Act”: Allowing Unsafe Drinking Water

Fluoride: Do we need it? Is it safe? How do we eliminate it?

rob — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:39:44 +0000

Fluoride has been in the news again. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has been lobbying the government since 2005 to reduce the legal level of fluoride in drinking water. Fluoride is a highly reactive Neurotoxin that is poisonous to the human body when it is ingested in drinking water.

The practice of fluoridation has always been controversial. Recent studies suggest that ingestion of fluoride can damage the thyroid gland and reduce children IQ levels. Other studies indicate that the rate of cavity formation in children is more closely tied to habits that conflict with preventative dental care.

Fluoride poisoning is not a sudden affliction and it is rare due to the low concentrations in our water. However, many of us have been drinking fluoridated water for our entire lifetime, and will continue to accumulate fluoride in our systems as long as we allow our governments to use the poison in our water supplies.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has finally come out with a recommendation to lower the maximum concentration of fluoride in municipal source water to 0.7 parts per million (or 0.7 mg/liter) from a previous range of 0.7 to 1.2. It is about time, but is a reduction enough, or should it be banned once and for all?

Do we need fluoride in our water?

Fluoride was first introduced into municipal water supplies in 1942 and use became widespread in the 1960′s. Today, it is estimated that 180 million Americans drink fluoridated water.

When fluoride was first introduced to water supplies, it was heralded as a wonderful advancement in the prevention of cavities, especially in children.

Fluoride doesn’t need to be ingested to prevent tooth decay as it can be applied directly to the enamel surface of teeth. However, there were no other alternatives fifty years ago. Over the ensuing years, fluoride has been introduced into toothpaste, thereby eliminating the need for fluoridated water for anyone that brushes their teeth with toothpaste, or practicing other methods of preventive dental care. It is recommended that children can start using toothpaste containing fluoride once they reach the age of 2.

In a recent study, researchers from Statistics Canada compared the tooth decay rates in the provinces of Ontario (which has Canada’s highest fluoridation rate at 75% ) and Quebec (which has the lowest rate at 6%). The research studies more than 5,000 children between the ages of 6 and 19 and found that the children in Quebec had only one half cavity more per child. For this statistically insignificant difference, the 8 million citizens in Ontario are intentionally fed a poisonous chemical in their water supply for life.

The use of fluoridated water has been banned in most of Europe and Asia, with no apparent increase in the incidence of cavities. I was unable to pin down exactly how many countries still allow fluoridation, but it appears to be somewhere between 14 and 32 and the number is decreasing each year.

The answer to whether we need fluoride in our water supply is a resounding NO.

Is fluoride safe?

The recent uproar about fluoride levels in our water supply have focused on dental fluorosis, which causes a discoloration in teeth of about 30% of our children. While nobody wants their kids to have discolored teeth, you have to wonder why nobody is talking about the far more serious problems associated with the prolonged use of fluoride.

The EPA released a study on fluoride a week ago Friday. The study found that prolonged, high intake of fluoride can increase the risk of brittle bones, fractures and crippling bone abnormalities. In fact, fluoride can potentially cause a crippling bone disease called skeletal fluorosis. In more mild forms, symptoms of this disease include chronic joint pain, similar to the symptoms of arthritis

Not enough to scare you? Fluoride has been found to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Fluoride has also been associated with low IQ and mental retardation in children (Hileman, 1988). Fluoride has also been associated with depressing the activity of a healthy thyroid which can be a cause of obesity. More than 20 million people in the United States receive treatment for thyroid problems.

Do you want to drink fluoride in your water? Do you want your children to be drinking water that has been fluoridated? I don’t!

How do you eliminate fluoride from our source water?

The best answer is to stop your municipality from fluoridating your water. How do you do that? Talk to your local elected officials and make it a political issue. Each municipality has the power to add or remove fluoride to its water as it is a local issue. The next time a local election comes around, make sure the fluoride issue is on the ballot. When the local dental association stands up for the inclusion of fluoride in the water, point out that the current research indicates that fluoride is no long needed.

The EPA has published a ten page Q&A Paper on Fluoride that you can read here:
http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/rulesregs/regulatingcontaminants/sixyearreview/upload/2011_Fluoride_QuestionsAnswers.pdf

If you want to get fluoride out of you water now (and who wouldn’t once they have read this article), there are steps you can take immediately in terms of filtering the water in your home.

For residential use, Reverse Osmosis systems offer the best solution in terms of efficiency and cost as they remove about 95% and cost from $200 to $600. You can also use activated alumina filters, which cost about $80 with the cansister, which remove about 75%. There is huge drop off to activated carbon filters that are believed to be only slightly effective at removing carbon.

Distillation will remove 100% of fluoride from the water, but it is a costly (usually about $3,000) process that is typically used for a point of entry (whole house) system. While skin does absorb fluoride, the extremely low concentration of fluoride in our water supply which means that distillation is overkill.

Summary

Fluoride is not needed in our water supply and it is bad for you.

The primary cavity producing years are from age 6 to age 18. Proper dental hygiene eliminates the need for fluoridated water.

Check with your local municipality to find out if you have fluoride in your water. If you do, take steps to install a filtration system that best suits your needs.

Finally, get proactive about having your municipality remove fluoride from your water supply.

Post script: Here is a link to a good article on the subject written by a MD from Calgary, Canada: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Fluoridated+water+ineffective+unsafe+unethical/4149640/story.html
The article questions the usefulness and safety of fluoride in our water supplies, but also addresses the ethical issue of whether people should be forced to drink fluoridated water when there is a lack of evidence to support it.

Explaining How Water Ionizers and Antioxidant Filters Work

rob — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 06:35:05 +0000

I have been a big fan of water ionizers since I first began drinking the water two and a half years ago. My water ionizer changed my life for the better… a lot better. I have been blogging a lot about the antioxidant filters lately, so you might think I have changed my thinking about water ionizers. That would be a false assumption because you don’t turn your back on an old friend. However,the introduction of antioxidant filters is changing the landscape of the alkaline water industry because the low cost effective machines have made healthy drinking water affordable for everyone.

How Water Ionizers Work:

Water ionizers work by the process of electrolysis. That means that when water is run over the electrically charged plates, the water is separated into two steams. One of the streams is rich in hydrogen ions (H+) and is called acidic water, and the other is rich in hydroxyl ions (OH-) and is called alkaline water. People drink the alkaline, or negatively charged water for its health benefits. People use the weaker forms of acidic water as a “beauty water” for their skin, or the stronger acidic water for cleaning.

When an electrical current (Amps) is run through the plates in the ionization chamber, the ionization process is enhanced. As the power is increased, the ionization increases.

A water ionizer won’t ionize unless there are cations such as calcium or magnesium in the water, or anions such as salts or bicarbonates. Most of the water ionizer companies place calcium or magnesium in their filters to insure that the ionization process is very strong.

In fact, the minerals that are introduced by the filters in water ionizers will ionize the water on its own without adding the electrical current that is supplied during electrolysis. The water ionizer companies that are selling the “bigger is better” scam would never want you to believe it, but it is true. How do I know this to be true? If you talk to anyone who has worked in the industry on the technical support or customer service side of the industry, they will tell you that a common complaint is that when customers receive a new water ionizer, they find that when they put the pH reagent drops in the water from different levels of ionization, the water turns purple for all settings. When the water turns purple with the pH test drops, that means that the pH of the water is 9.5 or higher. In fact, the water often turns purple when the pH reagent is used on the “purified” water that has not even been ionized when a machine is new. How could that be when there no electrolysis has taken place? The answer is simple: when the minerals introduced by the filters interact with the water supply, ionization occurs which causes the test drops to turn purple.

Purple water test results across the board are a nightmare for the tech support people. The tech support people at the various water ionizer companies tell their customers that when they run about 200 litres of water through their machine, the customer will start to see that different pH levels can be achieved and they are right. After the small amount of calcium or magnesium that is packed into the filters has been worked off, the filters will provide more normalized results. What they don’t tell you is that in soft water conditions, the performance of the water ionizer machines begin to lose their performance after 6 to 8 weeks unless customers install an inline re-mineralization filter before the water ionizer. Most people stop checking their test results after the first week or two so they never realize that their machines are not producing the desired results. It is important to test you machine with the pH reagent drops every week or two.

How Antioxidant filters work

Antioxidant filters perform two functions. They remove contaminants from the water, which is the water filter part. They also create powerful antioxidants by creating alkaline ionized water.

The Purification Process

The purifying process is fairly simple and can be achieved in one of two ways.

The Alkastream people use an ion exchange system which acts like a very efficient miniature water softener plus it uses some of the standard contaminant removal media. The ion exchange system is similar to what you will find in a Brita filter. The combination of the ion exchange system and a the standard removal media provide for very effective removal of chlorine, fluoride, VOCs, lead and mercury, which are the main contaminants in our water as well as other stuff that you don’t hear too much about.

The Revolutionizer doesn’t use the ion exchange system, but it does use the standard media known in the industry to remove contaminants.

I don’t know what the Ion Ways products will be using for purification as they haven’t announced anything yet. The fact Ion Ways hasn’t provided any information about their machine other than telling us the price indicates to me that they are a few months away or more.

The Antioxidant Process

Now lets turn to the antioxidant function of the antioxidant filters.

The process is really simple and I started to discuss it when I described the fact that most of the water ionizer companies put a small amount of calcium or magnesium in their filters to assist in the ionization process.

Dr. Hayashi, M.D., the “Godfather” of water ionizer research spent 15 years from 1985 to 2000 researching how and why water ionizers worked. By the year 2000, Dr. Hayashi came to the conclusion that you didn’t need to use electricity to ionize water through the process of electrolysis at all. In fact, Dr. Hayashi has requested that the great research paper that he published in 2000 that appears on many water ionizer websites be removed. Dr. Hayashi stands by his 15 years of research, but he found a low cost method of producing the same powerful antioxidant results.

Dr. Hayashi determined that it was free hydrogen that produced the beneficial health results, and you didn’t need electrolysis to achieve free hydrogen. He has officially requested that the high priced water ionizer companies stop using his research to promote their products when there is a much lower cost and effective alternative.

Dr. Hayashi discovered that if you run water through a media that contained magnesium, alkaline ionized water could be created that would be ideal for health drinking water. The low cost method of creating the water would produce the same health benefits as a water ionizer. The scientific explanation is that the water is the universal solvent because the hydrogen bonds that join the hydrogen atoms to the oxygen atom is a very weak bond. When you introduce a water molecule to a magnesium atom, the hydrogen bonds break and the oxygen attaches to the magnesium forming magnesium hydroxide and free hydrogen. Gabe Hunninghake has created a good illustration of this that can be seen at: http://nextgenionizer.weebly.com/video.html

I know, this stuff seems complicated and I bet nobody cares, but I had to learn about it so you have to read it… so there! The bottom line is that if you want healthy drinking water, you don’t have to purchase an expensive water ionizer.

Which machine should you purchase?

If you want purified water that provides the benefits of antioxidant alkaline water, all you need is an affordable Antioxidant Filter.

If can afford a water ionizer and a pre-filter system, you can have the added benefits of receiving strong and weak acidic water, and very high alkaline water that will remove pesticides from the surface of fruits and vegetables. The additional three benefits are great to have.

My wife loves the 5.5 pH “beauty water” as she uses it to wash her face and even to rinse her hair after she has used shampoo in her hair. You can buy 5.5 pH water very inexpensively from a grocery store in the form of Aquafina bottled water which is made by Pepsi, but it is not as convenient.

Some people use the strong acidic water as a disinfectant. We have tried it and it works, but we never seem to get around to it. The strong acidic water is definitely a “green” solution that we should all aspire to.

Soaking fruits and vegetables in 11.0 pH alkaline water does help remove pesticides from fruits and vegetables. However, it does take a long time to fill a sink with the water and the operating manuals do suggest soaking the fruits and vegetables for 20 to 30 minutes. At our house, we don’t seem to use this great feature very often because we never seem to have the time, which is more of a comment about our busy lives than a criticism of water ionizers. Typically, my wife just buys organic fruits and veggies now that they are more competitively priced.

As always, personal choices are what makes us all unique. You should choose which type of machine suits your needs and then select the brand and the retailer that feels right for you. Whatever choice you make with be a good decision because it will lead to a healthier life.

The comments and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are not intended as medical advice. Always consult your health care provider for health issues.