I am convinced that tap water is poison.

What an unhappy place to be, water being so essential to...life.

Dr. Michael Colgon, in his excellent book "Optimum Sports Nutrition" goes into detail about the dangers of tap water, with plenty of references to EPA documents and other studies.

Dang. *Doctor* Michael Colgan, CCN. 'Course, if I had time, I could probably go here:

http://www.naturalhealinginst.com/residential/ccn.html

and, with sufficient dedication, become Doctor Jim Hogan, CCN

I just point this out to say that the whole "doctor" things doesn't do anything for me in and of itself. If time allowed (which it doesn't), I might be interested in reading Colgan's stuff in more detail and maybe tearing him a new bunghole. As it is, the cynical me reflects that many "water is poison" arguments can be debunked (or diluted) and that many of the alarmists have vested interests in their positions (books, unregulated nutritional supplements, etc.)

Among other things, he makes a very convincing argument about escalating use of agricultural chemicals correlating with the esclating incidence of cancer. The #1 place we ingest those chemicals is in municipal water supplies.

I think that this is actually something to be concerned about....at the same time that I think it is really easy to cook up sloppy correlation studies linking prevalence of factor X with incidence of disease Y.

Colgon also describes the 4 step EPA mandated process for municipal water "treatment". It's disgusting. There are 4 steps: 1. Mechanical screening (to get out the used tires, branches, beer cans, etc); 2. Settling (to let the suspended solids sink to the bottom); 3. Precipitation (addition of chemicals to precipitate out dissolved substances like lead and a few others); 4. Superchlorination.

Most of us are surviving. Thanks God for Richard Nixon and the EPA!!

The chemicals used to perform the precipitation are all still in the water. So is everything that wasn't precipitated. So is all of the dead stuff from the chlorinization. So are thousands of dangerous chemicals, the concentrations of which aren't even tested.

It would be trivially easy for Colgan to test municipal water and make a case for what threatens us. Is that in the book?

What can you do? Don't drink it. It is dangerous. Seriously.

Sorry, man. Gotta drink....primeval urge....

There are two kinds of clean water: distilled and reverse-osmosis filtered. Many of the mineral bottled waters are simply tap water that has been bottled. Just because water is "spring water" doesn't mean it is clean; many bottled spring waters are extremely contaminated. There are "natural springs" whose water contain fatal concentrations of arsnic, for instance.

I would agree that "natural" guarantees nothing or that a particular spring guarantees nothing.

I drink distilled water.

What, no minerals? This may be OK for my car battery, but I WANT MINERALS!!

When I am at restaurants I drink coke or pepsi or equivalent (those products begin with RO filtered water). There may be chemicals in those beverages, but at least you know what they are.

Do you really know what they are??


Just because your water smells good doesn't mean its safe.

True.

Please, consider drinking and cooking with clean water.

Lucky me, I grew up in Boston where we had pretty decent water from the Quabbin Reservoir and no indication of elevated cancer rates or poisoning. More recently, I have been drinking the delightful water from the Seattle Water Department's mountain reservoirs. I expect that there are some agricultural runoff pollutants floating around in there, but I'm going to have to guess that a long, cool glass of poisonous Seattle water is something that the average resident of Baghdad or Tikrit would be *thrilled* to gulp down.