Doc, I just read Natural Cures by Kevin Trudeau. I am now looking into installing a reverse osmosis system in my house. My question is twofold, first, is this the best type of water source (as opposed to bottled etc.) and secondly if it is the best type of system, what do I look for with the various brands etc? Dan
ANSWER: I do not know the answer with respect to brand names or how well reverse osmosis works in the home compared to when it is done industrially. I can give you my ideas on the relative value of the different purification processes, however. Reverse osmosis is the process of pushing water through a membrane under pressue so that it leaves the contaminants in it behind. Activated carbon, on the other hand, is a column of charcoal beads that absorbs molecules with charge separation (regions of partial charge) or ions as water passes through. Since there is more space between charcoal beads than in the microscopic pores of a membrane, because charcoal becomes depleted as it removes more and more contaminants, and because activated carbon has a relatively low affinity for several contaminants (most metals, alcohols, ammonia, strong acids and bases, fluorine), reverse osmosis has a greater potential of contaminant removal both in the short (immediate) and long term (over the course of a month). Bottled "drinking water" is processed tap water whereas "spring water" is presumably from a natural spring upstream of where contamination is likely to occur (although regulations for this are insufficient). In both cases, the quality of the water varies dramatically from company to company, just as tap water quality varies dramatically between cities even when the cities are relatively close to each other (such as municipalities in the Bay Area). Reports for water quality for various cities can be found on the EPAs website but the reports are generally a couple years old, do not make it clear how their tap water compares to other water, and the data in the reports are next to pictures of streams and lakes, which makes me wonder about the clarity of the information (pun intended). My recommendation: Tap water is better than not drinking water, but at least filter your water through activated carbon if nothing else. Even better is to use reverse osmosis or buy bottled water that has gone through reverse osmosis. Spring water should in theory be the best of all options, but it is not clear to me that all spring waters actually come from the pristine environments we envision. What I do personally is the following: I buy a car-load of spring water when it is on sale, have no problem with bottled drinking water but tend not to buy it, and I have a Britta filter as a backup. If you find a good quality reverse osmosis system that would be a good way to go, but a combination of things like what I do is satisfactory given that the actual levels of contaminants in our water sources and even in the water produced by a reverse osmosis system in the home are not generally well known.
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