Yes, I did just misquote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that many of us have heard before, “Water, water, everywhere… not a drop to drink.” I think that my version applies much better to today’s life. We can get fresh drinking water just about everywhere. It comes out of your faucet at home, many stores have drinking fountains, bottled water is sold everywhere… heck you can even buy it at the hardware store. But the real question is… do you Dare A Drop To Drink.
What am I talking about? We are reading very often about how our home drinking water is contaminated and bottled water is just as bad if not worse. Just take your pick of contaminates; lead, pesticides, spores, bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and more. But we need water to survive. The human body is made up of about 90% water more or less and it can only go a few days without water. Did you know that for your body to function with the best performance, you need to drink half your body weight in ounces daily. So if your weight is say 150 lbs. you need to drink 75 oz. of water a day.
What is so very important to the body and we could talk all day about how the body uses it. Let me just mention one critical use of water by the body. Your blood is made up mostly of water and it carries oxygen and nutrients to your cells and waste from the cells out to be disposed of. I can’t stress how important it is to get your daily quota of fresh clean water. And NO! Coffee, tea, soda, sports drinks, and beer does not count as part of your daily quota of water. Yes there is water in those items, but the body has to work very hard to process it for use. So many people walk around daily very dehydrated… don’t even get me started. It makes me thirsty just thinking about it.
So what are we to do? Well many people I come across turn to their refrigerator for the answer. Many of the refrigerators sold in the past years have come with water filters built in that help to remove some of the contaminates. These filters may do an ok job of removing chlorine and other common contaminates, but they are just not made for the heavy duty high filtering needs of families on a daily basis. I checked out some of the refrigerator filters out there and found that many only remove a handful of contaminates and have a life of only a few hundred gallons. If you do the math on your daily water needs for drinking and cooking that means you would be changing the filters every month or so.
If you are drinking water daily from your refrigerator you may want to check the filters more often. The built in indicators that tell you when to replace them are often time based, which is no indicator of the contaminate levels in the filter. Keep in mind that when a filter is saturated it then begins to pass the contaminates it has filtered and this can cause the water to contain even higher levels than it did to start with. I let my refrigerator filter help to provide me with some decent ice and that is about it.
Some kind of external water filtering system is needed to do a better job. Next week we will talk more about water and what can be done to provide a healthy, easy, and affordable clean water source.
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