Protect Your Family With a Water Filter

Protect your family with a water filter

You might think that living in America, there is no need to have a water filter for our drinking water. Surely one of the perks of living in the first world is that we have a limitless supply of clean water coming from the tap whenever we need it?

Unfortunately, the truth does not quite live up to the expectation. Pour yourself a glass of tap water and take a drink. The taste alone is likely to tell you that something is not quite right, and tap water certainly tastes different to filtered or bottled water. That’s not to say it is dangerous, and most water tap water is deemed safe to drink by the EPA. But it does contain contaminants including lead, arsenic, copper and other substances.

Why does tap water taste funny?

The municipal powers-that-be definitely go out of their way to clean your tap water, have no doubt about it. The trouble is, they use chlorine and related chemicals to do so. Now chlorine is great for cleaning your toilet or disinfecting the kitchen floor. It is the main ingredient of bleach, after all. However, it sounds disturbing, to put it mildly, to know that it is in your drinking water.

Chlorine is added to kill bacteria that could otherwise cause serious illness. However, the chlorine carries risks of its own, and the World Health Organization identified correlations with higher instances of various cancers, reproductive problems, central nervous disorders and other health problems.

The ideal solution is for the chlorine to do its job while the water makes its dangerous journey to our homes, and for it then to magically disappear when it emerges from the tap. Fortunately, there is actually no magic involved, all you need is an effective water filter.

Water filters remove chlorine and fluoride

There’s a bewildering array of water filters on the market, but Berkey water filters are ones that remove chlorine to levels of 99.99 percent purity. The water filters at bigberkeywaterfilters are also able to filter out the fluoride that the majority of water municipalities add as a “little bonus.”

The addition of fluoride to water is one of the more contentious topics. The theory is that it reduces dental cavities, particularly in children, but there is a growing belief that it does more harm than good. The Center for Disease Control has commissioned a range of studies on the effects of fluoride, and they make alarming reading. Fluoride can lead to increased risk of cancer, gum disease, kidney problems, thyroid dysfunction, liver disease and a whole list of other serious and potentially life-threatening conditions. These water filters can also detect and filter out fluoride.

And then there are the bugs

The above factors are enough to give any parent pause for thought when it comes to the water they give their children. US tap water is far better than that in many countries, but clearly, it still makes sense for it to go through a water filter before you pour it into your children’s mouths.

Aside from the chemicals that are intentionally added to water, there is also the growing number of cases in which water is breaching EPA regulations to consider.

The Environmental Working Group has a host of online resources that provide state-by-state information on the pollutants that can be found in drinking water, and their website even contains a tool where you can enter your zip code to find out what the water quality is like in your area.

The range and scale of pollutants found is truly horrifying. Prescription drugs, pesticides, asbestos and bacterial matter from dead animals are just a few examples. Bear in mind that this is all in water that has been treated with chlorine and other chemicals to supposedly clean it of these contaminants.

Furthermore, a study by the National Academies Press detected chemicals originating from 39 different pesticides in 34 US states and Canadian provinces. It seems ironic that when we go to the cost and expense of choosing organically farmed produce to avoid feeding these pesticides to our children, they are actually present in our tap water.

Undersink water filters for your home can solve most of the above mentioned problems by creating a buffer between the water outlet (tap) for the domestic water supply inlet.

Taking control of the water your family drinks

The good news is that we can take effective action against all these risks. Using water filters provides the best level of protection for you and your family. And when the cost equates to only around seven cents per gallon in the long term, it seems madness to do anything else.