9 False Statements about Water Filters
- Reverse osmosis is the only way to filter out fluoride (or anything else!)
- Fluoride is good for you to drink. False. There may be reasonable arguments for use of fluoride in toothpaste. There is no justification for putting it in water. It is bad for people with eczema, thyroid issues, PFIES, and several other illnesses. Many studies show risks to IQ development from low levels of fluoride.
Fluoride is a poison
- There is no way to filter fluoride from the water. False. There are a few ways. You can filter out most of it.
- Activated Alumina – one material used to filter fluoride – adds aluminum to the water. False. Activated alumina is an inert natural resin and in no way harmful. No aluminum is added to your water. If it did, activated alumina would not have been certified to release nothing harmful into the water. And it has been certified. Activated alumina is not aluminum, which is a highly processed manufactured material including alumina. .
- It doesn’t matter if you get trace elements in your water. False. This can also be read as “Mother Nature doesn’t know what she’s doing.” We should be getting more trace elements from our food – but those have diminished greatly, especially if you are not eating organic foods. Get all the natural trace elements you can naturally. Adding some back after water has been stripped is better than not doing that. But not as good as leaving natural trace elements in the water in the first place.
- Chlorine is completely safe in our water. False. Chlorine is very useful in our water. But it is designed to kill living things. We drink it, we absorb it through skin, and we breathe it in. There are several studies showing health risks. It’s good to disinfect our water supply. That doesn’t mean we should take it into our bodies.
- Chloramine is safer than chlorine as a disinfectant because there are fewer disinfection byproducts. False. There are fewer. But there is nothing to support the idea that they are safer. For at least some people there is no question that they are more dangerous to health.
You can have healthy water
8. Drugs in the water are at too low a level to cause health issues. You can’t make that statement honestly, because there hasn’t been sufficient study. However, laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and breast cancer cells. Pharmaceuticals are designed to alter human physiology in small quantities. How they combine in our water supplies varies all the time. It is unreasonable to assume they are safe to drink.
- Water flow is bad if you use filters. For lots of filters, yes. But not all. None of the filters sold by Friends of Water reduce water flow by more than 1%.
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