Great Taste – Less Waste

Is your water treating you for an unknown disorder?

We don’t usually think of our drinking water as medicine though it is supposed to be healthy for us, but sometimes it has contaminants in it that aren’t good for us. We don’t take medicine that isn’t prescribed for us and we certainly don’t typically take something that we don’t know what it is and what it is for. That is, unless our water is contaminated with chemicals or medications and we are unaware of it. Then we are taking medicines we aren’t aware of.

Take for instance water that has high concentrations of lithium in it. Lithium is a soft metal that is widely distributed on Earth; it is present in sea water as well. Lithium is most commonly found in rocks and in brines. It is extracted from the water of mineral springs and brine pools and brine deposits in South America throughout the Andes Mountain chain with Chile being the leading lithium producer followed by Argentina. In the U.S. lithium is recovered from brine pools in Nevada.

Lithium is used primarily in lithium batteries; however it is also used in the pharmaceutical and fine-chemical industry. It is used to treat bipolar disorder as well as treatment-resistant depression worldwide.

According to a recent article, high concentrations of lithium were found in villages of the Argentinean Andes Mountains where people treated for bipolar disorder showed altered thyroid function. The Swedish research shows that hypothyroidism can be triggered by the ingestion of too much lithium which is apparently present in the ground water that is used as drinking water. “The amounts of lithium that the Latin American women are ingesting through their drinking water is perhaps a tenth of what a patient would take daily for bipolar disorder,” explained Dr. Karin Broberg, and occupational and environmental physician at Lund University in Sweden. “But on the other hand, they are absorbing this lithium all their lives, even from before birth. What this implies for their health, we don’t really know in practice. That is why we are planning a new study that will compare the health of two groups of mothers and children; respectively, the ones with the highest and lowest levels of lithium in their blood.”

The concern is that there are elements that are found naturally in and on the earth that are also being found in our drinking water here in the U.S. and we don’t have all the answers regarding the long term effects these may have on human life. There is certainly no way we can take simple ground water and ingest it without also ingesting contaminants that may have negative effects on our body in a variety of ways and severity. It means that drinking water needs to go through a series of treatments before we drink it in order for it to be truly safe to drink.

Municipal water treatment plants take ground water and run it through a series of filters and chemical treatments to remove bacteria and other contaminants in order to make it “safe” to drink, but that all that means is that the water won’t make you sick to your stomach. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other contaminants left in the water known or unknown that may have long-term negative effects on the body. There are things left in the water that we simply don’t know enough about, just like lithium. The reality is that we can’t blindly drink water without taking into account where it has been and what it has touched. We must think of our own health and well being, consider that our water can either benefit it or take it away from us completely. We can purchase home water treatment systems today that will better guarantee the safety of our drinking water. All it takes is one little system mounted under the sink or a convenient water cooler in the corner and we can drink all the water we want knowing it is really safe, healthy, great tasting water. We can’t ask for peace of mind from someone else, we can only give that to ourselves. Drinking water shouldn’t be assumed to be clean; we must do our own guaranteeing.