Health Minute: Water & Your Health
Most common symptom
Health Minute Audio Summary:
What’s the most important ingredient to good health? If you think it’s good, natural food, you’re wrong? If you think it’s the right kind of vitamin supplements, you’re wrong again. You can live without food for 30 or 40 days. What you can only live without for a couple of days is water. Water is therefore the supreme health ingredient. Our bodies are 70% water, and all that water is replaced every five to ten days! But what is the quality of the water you drink?
Drinking water that’s full of poison would obviously not be very beneficial to your health. Thus, we must approach water from the point-of-view of both quality and quantity. For good health you must have enough water (quantity), but almost more important, you must have pure water (quality) for it to really benefit your health.
WATER QUALITY PROBLEMS
Several problems emerge when it comes to water quality. Here are some possible sources of contamination:
Air Pollution —So what does air pollution have to do with water pollution? Rain and snow fall through the atmosphere and pick up whatever contaminants are in the air. Once upon a time rain or snow water would have been pretty pure, but not today. Keep in mind that this is where all the fresh water ultimately comes from. So, even before anything else happens to water, its original source is polluted. It only gets worse from there on.
Agricultural Chemicals—Pesticides, herbicides and nitrates from synthetic fertilizers all eventually end up in the underground water supplies. While I’m big supporter of organic farming, and am an organic gardener myself, that can have it’s drawbacks too. Cattle manure, that good organic fertilizer we like to use, also contaminates the water. This has become a significant issue particularly around feed lot operations.
The nitrates from synthetic fertilizers can form cancer-causing compounds called nitrosamines. High nitrate levels are very common in major agricultural areas such as the central valleys in California.Industrial Chemical Wastes —Benzene, Trichloroethylene, and Trihalomethanes are but a few of the common industrial chemicals that can affect water.
Heavy Metals —The EPA says that 38 million Americans are drinking water that exceeds the 50 ppb maximum for lead. Other toxic metals like arsenic, excess copper, mercury and others can also affect the water. Lead and other heavy metals can come from water pipes, soldered joints on copper pipes, and brass fixtures.
Pathogenic Organisms —Here we’re concerned with bacteria, viruses, protozoa, amoebae and the like. Of particular concern is the Cryptosporidium protozoan parasite. The largest recorded outbreak of a waterborne disease in U. S. history was caused by this organism in Milwaukie, Wisconsin in 1994. The statistics are incredible: 400,000 people ill, 41,000 treated for abdominal cramps and diarrhea, 4000 hospitalized, and 104 people dead! As is probably obvious, chlorine doesn’t kill Cryptosporidium.
Chlorination —What? Chlorination as a source of water contamination? I thought that’s what we did to water to make it healthy? Well, yes and no. Chlorine does kill harmful bacteria and viruses, but it also can combine with organic contaminants in the water (like sewage) to form chloroform and Trihalomethanes (THM’s), both of which are potent carcinogens.
F. Von Deltinger, M.D. stated that injury to the mitral valve of the heart and cardiac insufficiency may result from severe exposure to chlorine.To further complicate this, Vitamin E, often thought of as the “heart vitamin,” is destroyed by chlorine exposure. This may be part of the reason for the link between heart disease and water chlorination.
Fluoridation —If I was on controversial ground on waterchlorination, I’m really pushing the envelope on water fluoridation. Fluoridation of public drinking water supplies is an emotional issue to say the least. Never has so much energy been exerted attempting to persuade the public that something was good for them. Opposing fluoridation often gets one caricatured as a little old lady seeing communists behind every tree. The proponents of fluoridation are excellent propagandists, who understand the principle that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will eventually accept it as truth.
