Choosing Your Drinking Water
I have urged people for many years to use special purified drinking water and to avoid the faucet. I have not drunk tap water in more than a decade; instead, I have used well water or spring water collected from mountain or underground sources (unfortunately these waters can be contaminated also) or, more recently, home-filtered tap water. But lately there have even been questions regarding the purity of bottled waters and the effectiveness of filters. What is the right thing to do? Clearly, scientific research and the marketing information of companies selling water and the various water cleaners may differ. After all, advertising has a big influence on our nutrition in general and certainly has and continues to be a hindrance that must be overcome to achieve a healthier diet and lifestyle. The government can only protect the consumer from gross misrepresentation and not subtle interpretation of "facts."

Let’s look at our drinking water choices before we decide. We don’t want to worry or be fanatic, but since water is second in importance only to air for sustaining life, we do want to do the best we can with the current knowledge and inner guidance we have. Taste and smell can help us assess if our water is good for us. However, the presence of negative health factors may not alter taste or smell. If there is a question about water safety, we can have our drinking supply, whatever it is, analyzed for bacteria, minerals, or chemical pollutants.

My goal in this section on water, since there is much technical information I cannot include here, is to give you the basics about drinking water so you can at least ask yourself what is best. Water is an important component of nutrition. The first step of good nutrition is to know the origin, processing, and contents of anything we take into our bodies. Now let’s talk about the many sources of water available to us.

Tap Water
Most tap water comes from surface reservoirs formed from rivers, streams, and lakes, or from groundwater. Groundwater refers to the subterranean reservoirs that hold much of the earth’s water and supply nearly all the rural drinking water and about half of city water supplies. The water from these sources goes through local treatment plants, many of which use a very old process of settling tanks, filtration through sand and gravel, and then chemicals to clean up the water so it is fit for human consumption.