5 Reasons to Use a Water Filter

Daily Health Solutions, Nutrition
on April 13, 2012

Water is vital to good health. The human body cannot live without water for more than a few days. Without access to clean water, life-threatening disease is impossible to avoid. Filtered water is a great way to get your six to eight glasses a day of healthy, contaminate-free water.

1. Drinking contaminated water is the leading cause of disease in developing countries. Tap water can contain thousands of possible contaminants, several of which are poisonous. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posts a daunting list of possible drinking water contaminants, ranging from various microorganisms, disinfectants, disinfectant byproducts, inorganic chemicals, organic chemicals and radionuclides.

2. Bottled water is expensive and may not be as clean as tap water or filtered water. All About Water states that since bottled water is considered a food, it is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration — unlike municipally treated water that is regulated by the stricter EPA. It is not always possible to trust that all bottled water is of the highest quality and free of contaminants. The Natural Resources Defense Council studied bottled water extensively in 1999. The findings contrasted the image of purity advertised by bottled water companies. The studies found bottled water to actually be tap water much of the time — perhaps as often as 40 percent of the time.

3. Bottled water may leach chemicals from the bottle into the water, and then into your body when you drink it. The chemicals in the plastic bottle also end up polluting the environment during manufacture and after the bottle is discarded. The use of so much plastic is a drain on remaining petroleum sources — the non-renewable natural resource.

4. Boiled water is safe to drink but tastes flat and is inconvenient. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recommends adding oxygen back into the boiled water by pouring it back and forth between to containers, essentially aerating it. Water purified with reverse osmosis can remove some contaminants, but other possible contaminants are small enough to pass through the semipermeable membrane used in the process of reverse osmosis. According to the All About Water website, the volatile organic chemicals and chlorine molecules are small. These molecules can pass through and remain in the drinking water after reverse osmosis. Distilled water removes much of the minerals, heavy metals, bacteria and viruses from drinking water, but does not remove chlorine and chlorine byproducts like volatile organic compounds (or VOCs). Both distillation and reverse osmosis water treatment leave water that is highly acidic, causing the potential for bones and teeth damage.

5. Filtration may remove more contaminants than other water purification methods while leaving a healthy amount of trace minerals that also improve the taste. Water filtration is one of the only water treatments that can remove chlorine, chlorine byproducts and dangerous volatile organic compounds. Some contaminates are even chlorine resistant. Giardia and cryptosporidium are two types of chlorine resistant protozoa that can make you sick. Filtration provides an effective means of the elimination of these protozoa from your drinking water.