You can do a lot for your health just by drinking enough good quality drinking water. How is the quality of your water? Is it acidic or basic? What’s in it? Ever look at your water quality report?
Water Quality Report
Every city makes its water quality report available to the public. Take a look at it and make sure you are comfortable with what it says. If you are unsure of a particular level of chemical in it, take it to your doctor and ask her or him. If your water is problematic in some way, then you know what you need to target when choosing a water filtration system.
Click here to see Big City Water Ratings from the Environmental Working Group. This page is interesting because it ranks the water in the top 100 cities across the United States relative to each other. I learned nitrates tend to be a problem in our local area. Yuck! My understanding is nitrates are implicated in Alzheimer’s. Gotta call Charlie! Oh well, I understand if I just use a cell phone it prevents those plaques from forming in my brain, so if I go ahead and drink our local water and use a cell phone, I’m good! I wonder what else that EMR does…
Your Water’s PH Balance
The acid/base balance in your body is critical. If your body is too acidic, this will make you sick–candida, cancer and inflammation are all fed by acidic environments. Your body can be made acidic by eating too much acidifying foods–generally meat and starchy foods. A healthy diet–eating the recommended 5 servings of vegetables and fruits each per day, plus some probiotics– should regulate your body to be slightly alkaline. But your water also has a major impact. Start by buying some litmus papers at your local health food store. Test the Ph of your body by pricking your finger with a needle and testing the blood–you must test blood from capillaries, not from a vein or artery. Is the Ph between 7.4 and 6.8? If so, you’re good! But if not, you need to make some changes. I think the first thing to do that makes sense is to start eating and drinking homemade fermented foods, which have a balancing effect on the body. If that doesn’t bring you into balance, then look into your drinking water. You may need to make it more basic. We just tested our water today–and found out it’s acidic. This is very common today. Our water supply is becoming polluted.
Electrolytes
Increasing the alkalinity of your water sounds logical. But drinking baking soda every day doesn’t strike me as necessarily smart. There are many other minerals we need other than sodium bicarbonate. Warnings about drinking baking soda abound. In case you are curious, before I researched this I did try adding baking soda (1/8 tsp) to a glass of water. I tried it and never felt better after about 8 hours of drinking it. Really, I had fantastic energy and was very happy! Then I had no interest in sleep until about 2am. Now it strikes me that my approach may not have been an altogether good thing. Is a baking soda supplement to your diet really increasing the balance in your body?
An electrolyte drink may be a better solution.
This website compiles much of the resources online on the topic:
http://www.causeof.org/electrolytes.htm
A balanced electrolyte drink may do a much better job of hydrating your body than tap water, and it sounds much safer to me. Many recipes you will find online are very sugary, however. Is this good? This investigation is leading me down the rabbit trail of homemade fermented food & drink–probiotics. These natural electrolyte sources are likely a much safer and better way to achieve balance in your system.
Chloramine
In our county chloramine has been added to the water since 1983 in order to keep the bacteria counts adequately low. This change from chlorine to chloramine is a significant one. Once the change was made, small animals at UC Berkeley, such as fish and rats, were affected. The small fish died. There was a group of lab rats that refused to drink the chloramine-containing water. UC Berkeley had to go to considerable expense to get the chloramine out of the water used in its scientific laboratories and that used to irrigate sensitive habitats in the vast Botanical Garden there.
I decided to do like the lab rats. But I didn’t want to live on bottled water which can have its own unknown problems (and can also contain chloramine). So I turned to Charlie at Your Water Company. Charlie is obsessed with water quality, and, in particular, getting chloramine out of water. His filters remove the chloramine while leaving the health-giving minerals naturally contained in the water. He can show you his filters are working to remove the chloramine from your water using sophisticated test equipment to show you the difference before and after installation.
I have always had sensitive skin, and prior to getting these filters installed, I had begun to have trouble with the skin on my cuticles cracking and bleeding, so we decided to get a whole house filter as well as an under-sink drinking water system. It was expensive for us at the time; the price has dropped a bit since. I wasn’t willing to live with bleeding cuticles, and the implication for what the water was doing to the parts on my insides was clear, so we went ahead and did it. I have no more trouble with my cuticles, and I have peace of mind now when I go to the sink to get a glass of water. It’s also a potential tax writeoff.
Charlie can tell you dramatic stories about his clients, a couple of whom have children diagnosed with autism whose symptoms disappeared with this simple change. A visit to the eye-opening website Citizens Concerned about Chloramine yields some clues as to the reasons behind these recovery stories. Three facts on their website which got my attention: 1) chloramine can cause lead to leach from drinking water pipes, 2) chloramine may bioaccumulate in the body, and 3) chloramine is not as effective as chlorine at killing biological contaminants. People on the autism spectrum are known to have inadequate methylation pathways, and as a result have trouble eliminating their bodies of the heavy metals and other toxins we are all taking in when we drink water or breathe city air. If the water has more lead in it due to the addition of chloramine, kids who have trouble getting rid of lead are going to have greater problems. Accumulation of chloramine in the body can’t be good. And if an autistic child’s condition is caused by an underlying infection which the child is having trouble overcoming, which researchers list as one of several possible causes of autism, being exposed to more biological contaminants would only do harm. Of course autism is a complex problem and no one is claiming that a water filtration system will cure it if you have one installed, but it has happened, and you have to admit that’s an interesting fact. I am sure their families are happy about it.
The holy grail here is to be so healthy that you don’t have to worry about little things like chloramine and inadequate methylation pathways. But in the mean time, we went ahead and had a filtration system installed.
I do not receive any payment for endorsing Charlie’s products, by the way; I’m just a fan.
A very important water amendment you can take which will have a huge global positive impact on your life is ionic mineral drops. Our energy healer has been using these and a vegetarian diet to heal cancer! The brand he recommends is Adya. If you are sick with the flu or a cold or any more minor ailment, 10 drops of Adya in every 8 ounce glass of drinking water should knock any such ailment out in a week or so. Take them for 3 weeks at this level, then back of to a maintenance level of 1 or 2 drops per glass. You will be amazed at the results.