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Termyn8or -> RE: drinking water "myths" ???? (4/14/2008 10:00:39 PM)
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DK that is interesting. I mean on the most simplistic level remember when in Mexico "Don't drink the water", well what the hell do you drink ?
I do disagree with your shunning of "old ways". I will agree that some of the old ways were wrong, and I mean some of them were REALLY wrong, but nonetheless enough of them were right, otherwise we would not be here.
However I will not romanticise about the old ways. There are many things that have changed. People used to be able to live on biscuits and gravy, but no more. The nutrients are no longer in those things in sufficient quantity to sustain human life. They used to let a chicken rot before cooking it I heard, well some did. I don't think I'll embrace that custom..
But the old ways were the old ways because they worked, there was usually no alternative to some things. We can't discount them completely. While I do make dietary and other decisions based on "the old ways" I know the limitations of that type of thinking.
Water is no different really. My life today is how it is, and when I am in an environment in which I can't drink beer, I drink very little fluids. The only other thing I drink is bottled water at work. Drinking that I can taste the difference and actually am considering bumming some off of them to make some tea or something. I'd pay for it, and I know they do not want to run out, but we all agree that tap water sucks.
(See I can meander back to the subject)
Some of the chemicals in alot of tap water are necessary, for example clorination. Heating the water easily removes that, but unfortunately it also removes other gases that naturally dissolve in water. There's not alot, but there is some, errrrr, there was. So if you boil tap water and refrgerate it, it doesn't make it God's gift. Far from it.
Flouridation of the water supply has also been the topic of much debate. They say it helps people's teeth yet dentists are making a killing. Also, researchers found that lab rats fed high dosages of the sodium flouride used in the water made them appear less intelligent. That is they noted poorer times for running through a maze and things like that. Of course they overloaded them with it so you might call it an unfair comparison. Seems so until you factor in the relative cognitive level of a human to a lab rat.
And the word to notice there was sodium. Sodium flouride is a byproduct of nuclear waste. It is a solid. Almost anything you combine with sodium is solid at room temperature. That means boiling the water will not remove the flouride, it would if it were a gas dissolved in the water like chlorine, but it is not.
Disregarding city water for now, in the old days people learned how to brew coffee and tea. In doing so many times the water is heated or boiled. Before modern treatment plants I have no doubt that alot of disease was transmitted via the water supply. Of course back then many times they lacked the means to scientifically prove it out. If the water was discovered to be tainted it was by physical, empirical evidence of the most rudimentary kind.
A friend of mine's Mom used to say "They're putting something in the water", and I mean she was used to chlorinated water, but whatever this was it did not taste right to her.
Funny that happened to me a few years ago with milk. More recently I heard that milk is now "stabilized" which approximately doubles it's shelf life. I used to be an avid milk drinker and in the time of a few months I no longer wanted it at all. Did my taste change that quickly ?
All I know is this, I can smell tap water, but I can't smell bottled water. What does that tell me ?
T
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