Your Essential Need
For Clean Water
We’ve all heard the largest portion of the body is water. This makes the need for clean water a real issue. The fact is, water makes up about 60% of our body weight. Harder to grasp is the volume – about 40 liters, or ten and a half gallons.
Water losses and gains
The water we lose every day is called obligatory water loss. That means the minimum we would have to replace even if we didn’t exercise or stress our bodies at all. This amounts to at least two liters (remember, this is the smallest amount).
To avoid dehydration, most people have a need for clean water at about a gallon a day (more in hot weather or with exercise).
Where does that water come from? It comes partly from what we eat and drink and partly from our own metabolism. Most natural foods have a high water content, however processed foods may not.
Many processed foods have water removal as part of the operation – this saves on weight and shipping costs. We still get about a half liter of water from the breakdown of carbohydrates, but this isn’t enough.
To maintain health, we need clean safe healthy drinking water to replenish our body’s supply on a regular basis. Your essential need for clean water is life-long and ongoing.
In the US, we are blessed with generally safe water supplies, but ‘generally’ isn’t quite good enough. Elsewhere, the need for clean water is much greater, with current estimates of about a billion people on the planet who do not have reliable access to safe water.
Contaminated drinking water is responsible for about a half million deaths a year. That is directly responsible, ‘indirectly’ isn’t known. The problem is that we don’t know what really constitutes ‘completely safe’ when it comes to water. Even in modern industrialized countries, water remains a concern.
Recent rules from the US Environmental Protection Agency require all public water suppliers to report to their constituents the local water quality. Called a consumer confidence report, it details where the water comes from, what contaminants are in it, and what steps consumers can take to protect the water supply. Clean safe healthy drinking water is both an individual and a community concern.
Why does the water supply need protection? The need for clean water isn’t just a human consideration. Just as water moves important elements around in our bodies, it transports nutrients and chemicals throughout the environment around us.
Ground water transport and runoff from rain moves salts and minerals as well as fertilizers, herbicides and noxious chemicals from the point of application into the general water supply. What is dumped in one place becomes part of the larger aquifer.
The real problem is a lack of knowledge. No one can say definitely that the level of contaminants coming out of the tap is completely safe. There are standards in place and they are generally followed fairly well. But the standards are ‘best guesses’. Our need for clean water is not a guess.
We know what large levels of pollution do – they kill or cause immediate disease. The question is what lower levels do over long time periods. This is much harder to discover. For now, the best approach is to drink the healthiest water available to you.
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