The Health Benefits Of Drinking Filtered Water
Water filters are becoming more and more popular in recent years and this is nothing but great news for anyone who is interested in helping people lead good and healthy lives. If you’ve been considering the purchase of a water filter pitcher or any other type of water filter and would like further advice on whether they’re the right solution for you, let’s take a look at some of the health benefits of drinking filtered water.
The Effective Filtration Of Chemicals and Contaminants
Filtered water is devoid of a lot of chemicals and water contaminants such as:
- Fluoride and Chloride. These chemicals are typically used by municipalities to cleanse the municipal tap water of contaminants. And they do this work rather well, but they are also not very healthy themselves. Fortunately, most countries, states and cities in the developed world use Fluoride and Chlorine sparingly and in such quantities that they are harmless to the human body. They are still chemicals, however, and in large quantities they can be harmful. For example, water filters greatly reduce the risk of rectal cancer, colon cancer, and bladder cancer by removing chlorine and chlorine byproducts from drinking water. And such large quantities are not unreachable – if you drink a lot of tap water or you take long and steamy showers, you might drink or breathe in too much Fluoride and Chlorine. Especially when it comes to breathing them in or inhaling them in the bathroom, a whole house water filter can be of great help as it doesn’t only filter your kitchen sink water, but it filters the water of your entire home.
- Arsenic. Depending on where you live, your tap water may contain dangerous levels of arsenic. Arsenic is a powerful carcinogenic, that has been linked to an increased risk of the development of several types of cancer.
- Aluminum. If your municipal water supply is unfiltered or poorly filtered, it may lead to an increased consumption of aluminum, a metal that has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease, hyperactivity, learning disabilities in children, skin problems, liver diseases and more.
- Cryptosporidium and Giardia. Water filters reduce the risk of gastrointestinal disease by more than 33 percent by removing cryptosporidium and giardia from drinking water.
Filtering your tap water with a faucet filter or any other type of filter can dramatically reduce the amount of these and a lot of other contaminants in your drinking water – allowing you to remove from your life all the risks and problems that they can cause.
Promote The Absorption Of Vital Nutrients
- Filtered water can help with our nutrient absorption. If you are using an alkaline ionizer water filter, you will be drinking not just filtered, but alkaline water. Such filtered water is great in a lot of ways, including the fact that it creases the rate that water molecules and nutrients are absorbed by your cells. This greatly improves your metabolism and overall health.
- Filtered water helps to speed up our metabolism which is vital for the proper functioning of our bodies. Better nutrient absorption is far from the only way filtered water improves our metabolism. Families with water filters at home are statistically noted to increase the amount of water they consume. And since water, together with sport and exercise, is one of the key components in improving your metabolism, having filtered water at home is a great way to improve our health.
- By speeding up our metabolism, filtered water helps us lose weight. A fast and well-functioning metabolism is good not only for maintaining the proper functioning of our bodies, but also for better digestion, and as a result – for losing weight.
Improve The Health Of Your Skin
- Drinking filtered water is also very important for the proper hydration of our skin. The cosmetic industry is growing with each passing day as we try and make our skin look better and better, all the while we keep drinking sugary drinks and sodas. Filtered water, particularly when drank in sufficient quantities (which is easy because it is delicious!) is one of the best ways to improve the hydration and health of your skin, all the while saving unimaginable sums of money due to buying less make-up and cosmetics.
Detoxify Your Body
- Detoxification is another one of the key health benefits of drinking filtered water. Drinking filtered or alkaline water can have a significant effect on the detoxification of your body. Drinking distilled water is also great for detoxification, but only for a short while (never drink distilled water for a prolonged period of time as it can invite a lot of health problems!) With the amount of junk food we eat nowadays, as well as all the other ways we consume chemicals and toxins, proper detoxification is essential for everyone’s health. And drinking filtered water is one of the most important things that can assist you in pursuing this goal.
- Filtered water doesn’t just remove a lot of chemicals and natural contaminants from our water, it also preserves healthy mineral deposits that are important for our well-being. A good water filter will work in such a way that it will filter 99% of the contaminants in your tap water, while letting healthy minerals through. Not only that, but a lot of great water filters work by adding minerals to your drinking water in various different ways.
- Filtered water, particularly alkaline ionized water, is also very effective in helping us keep a healthy pH balance in our bodies. In today’s age of junk food and highly acidic foods, the average pH balance of any westerner is way deeper into the acidity range of the alkaline / acidic scale than it should be. The other end of the scale is unhealthy too, of course, but a proper balance should be maintained to protect your body from the various diseases and ailments, including cancer problems that come from an overly acidic environment. Drinking filtered and / or alkaline ionized water is a great way to counteract a lot of the acidic foods we consume and maintain a healthy pH balance.
Enjoy Tastier Meals
- Filtering your tap water is also great for your cooking. There is a reason why every top restaurant uses countertop water filters, under sink water filters or whole house water filters in their kitchens. We often forget that we don’t just drink tap water but we also cook with it. And while with cooking we often boil the water and thus a lot of contaminants such as chlorine get evaporated, a lot of the other tap water contaminants remain. And as such, we don’t just consume a less-healthy or unhealthy food, but we also compromise the taste of our home food. If, instead, we use a water filter, all this is counteracted and our home-made food is much more delicious and healthy.
Improve The Health Of Your Children And Entire Family
- Drinking pure water is especially important for children - as water filters provide the healthiest water for every child’s developing immune system. As adults, we often close our eyes to some of the unhealthy things we do and consume on a daily basis. After all, we are adults, we make our own decisions, and – as some of the more cynical of us may say – we are half-way through life already. This isn’t the case with children, however. A child’s body is still developing until its late teen years and drinking high quality water is one of the best things we can do for that development, together with proper eating habits and exercise. If you have children, you have taken the responsibility of giving them a good and healthy life, and getting a high quality water filter for your home is one of the easiest and best ways of fulfilling that responsibility (or at least a part of it).
- Filtering water with an Ion Exchange Filter also has a lot of significant benefits. Ion exchange is designed to remove dissolved salts in the water, such as calcium. This system actually softens the water or exchanges natural-forming mineral ions in the water with its own ions. As a result, it neutralizes their harmful effect of creating scale build-up. The ion exchange system was originally used in boilers and other industrial situations before becoming popular in-home purifying units, which usually combine the system with carbon for greater effectiveness.
Encourages The Drinking Of Water
- Having filtered water at home also encourages people to drink more water. This in and of itself is arguably one of the chief benefits of filtered water, more so than its many technical advantages. This is because without a water filter we are not only drinking sub-par water, but we are subconsciously (or often – consciously) drinking less water than we should. The human body requires between 2 and 3 liters of water per day, depending on its overall mass and weight – this is clean water, not sodas, juices, beer or even teas and soups. These 2 – 3 liters of water are essential for our metabolism and overall health and wellbeing. And it is statistically shown that when we drink tasteless water or water with bad odor we tend to drink much less than that, driving ourselves to chronic dehydration and unhealthiness. This is especially bad for children, because it is both harming their still developing organs, as well as giving them the habit of ignoring water and drinking other things – a habit that can persist in their adult life and be detrimental for their future health.
Reduces Bottled Water Consumption
- Having filtered water at home also discourages us from drinking bottled water. A lot of people are conscious enough not to substitute water with beer and sodas, but still substituted filtered tap water with bottled water which isn’t a good substitute. Bottled water is – on a whole – significantly less healthy than filtered tap water. The plastic that leaks into it alone is (or should be) plenty of reason for us to avoid bottled water at all cost in most situations other than dehydration and lack of any other clean water sources around.
- Drinking filtered water is also extremely cost-effective. And while this is not a “health benefit” in and of itself, by making our pockets heavier, filtered water leaves us with sufficient funds to take care of our health in a lot of other ways itself. People keep comparing filtered tap water with bottled water, but a more accurate comparison would be “bottled water vs filtered tap water + a monthly fitness subscription + any food supplement that you happen to need, all for the same money as we monthly spend on bottled water”. We keep complaining about the price of gas and a lot of other things, all the while we are giving insane amounts of money per gallon for water that’s been taken from our municipal supply, filtered with filters that have been already applied to said water by the municipality and then enclosed in a thin plastic container for weeks and months on end. On average, bottled water is up to 1000 times more expensive per gallon than tap water + the price of getting a water filter for your home. This is a difference that each and every one of us an easily take and apply in a lot of healthy activities and foods instead.
Great For The Environment
- Drinking filtered water instead of bottled water also has a considerably positive environmental effect. And while this too isn’t a direct “health benefit”, keeping our environment plastic-free has a significant long-term health, comfort and wellbeing effect on us all. We don’t mean to get too sappy and “green”, but a large reason why the air in big cities is becoming harder and harder to breathe is because of the pollution emitted by the plastic and petrochemical industries, a big part of which are the bottled water brands. And the irony of it all is that we are increasingly contaminating our natural water supplies with our plastic and heavy industries, causing the need for increased filtration when its time to drink it. Basically, with each passing year the filtration factories of bottled water brands are having to filter said water from the contaminants that they themselves put into it in previous years. And we are asked to pay for it, instead of keeping our environment and lives clean and healthy with a simple and efficient home water filter.
Conclusion
As you can see, filtering your water at home isn’t just something you should do for the taste of it. Owning a great water filter can dramatically improve your wellbeing and overall health in ways that you haven’t even thought of before.
Resources:
