Better Hydration, Better You

Isn’t it silly how much fluff you often find on important topics. #Drinking water #hydration #health and all related things are a prime example of this. Who do you believe? So many articles, so many opinions ….

Yet it is important to YOU to have a good working knowledge of proper hydration. At least there is consensus that healthy drinking water is an indispensable part of any healthy lifestyle. I am just going to walk you through some common knowledge about drinking water, without going deep into the science behind it - although you’ll excuse just a little bit of indulgence where necessary. I will also avoid any controversial issues - there are many!

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First, an overview that will show why we have troubled waters.

Water is known as the Universal Solvent. It dissolves more substance than any other liquid. All life on earth depends on this wonderful characteristic. However, humanity now finds itself on the wrong side of this same attribute of water: almost all the chemicals we produce eventually end up as chemical pollutants in our planet’s water sources.

These days most water sources, including many natural springs and boreholes are chemically polluted. The amount of toxic and synthetic chemical compounds in our water sources is staggering, ranging from heavy metals (e.g. mercury, cadmium, lead, arsenic and chromium) to complex synthetic and organic pesticides (.e.g. organophosphate, carbamate and organochlorine pesticides) to hormones. Even rainwater is often contaminated with atmospheric pollutants.

Natural Water bottlers typically do three things to the source water before bottling: (1) Filter the water thoroughly to remove sediment, (2) pass the water by ultraviolet light to kill microorganisms and (3) add ozone as a chemical disinfectant to avoid any possible growth of microorganisms. They DO NOT clean the water chemically. In other words, any chemical contaminants that may be present in the source water, go straight into the bottle.

Furthermore, when ozone is added to water, hydroxyl radicals are formed, which are detrimental to long term health. Both ozone and hydroxyl radicals form complicated bonds with those chemicals present in the source water, compromising the water’s taste and chemical integrity.

Some more clarification on ozone is warranted, as it is so commonly used in drinking water production, and ozonated water is even hailed as being “ozone fresh”. Ozone is the most aggressive free radical. Ozone in the air is associated by many with freshness, but this is at best a half-truth. Depending on where it occurs in the atmosphere, it can be either good or bad. Because air pollution causes ozone to form, atmospheric ozone has been researched extensively over the last 50 years and is well understood. The harmful effects of ground-level ozone on human health have also been studied intensely and similarly well documented. It has been said that ozone is “Good up High – Bad Nearby”. We will leave it to the interested reader to do his/her further research on atmospheric ozone. An excellent resource is the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website www.epa.gov.

We will continue our discussion only on ozone in water. As in air, ozone in water is a very powerful chemical disinfectant. In water, the ozone (O3) molecule is highly unstable and easily dissociates into oxygen (O2) and various reactive oxygen species (hydroxyl radicals, peroxides, superoxides, etc).

These oxygen species react aggressively with organic molecules, so much so that they kill pathogens (viruses, bacteria and even some parasites), should they encounter them. This is exactly why it is unhealthy to drink ozonated water: those aggressive oxygen species will also attack the living cells in the tissue of your mouth, throat and stomach. They will kill the probiotic bacteria in your stomach as well.

It has become “standard industry practice” to ozonate water before bottling or refilling. How has this come about? Ozone has been used effectively, for generations, as a disinfectant in primary water treatment, especially in Europe. Understandably, the practice carried over to the drinking water industry when demand for bottled water emerged. From a biological point of view, it makes sense to ozonate (to eliminate any possibility of viruses, bacteria and parasites), but chemically, one has to think twice.

It saddens me to see how ozone is being used indiscriminately in the drinking water trade, worldwide. At the recommended ozone dosage for sterilising water (as used by the vast majority of water bottles), you will swallow trillions of hydroxyl radicals with each mouthful! Many refill suppliers operate at even higher levels, to the point where the hydroxyl radicals can easily be tasted in the water.

Is it even necessary to ozonate properly prepared drinking water? Not if you know what you are doing and if you care about people’s health and water quality.

Also, be informed that proponents of ozone often argue that ozone has a half-life of 20 minutes in water and therefore decomposes quite rapidly. While this is true, they fail to acknowledge that the ozone doesn’t “go away”, but forms radical oxygen species as it decomposes. Those radical oxygen species are very unhealthy if ingested.

Tap Water - In most parts of the world, tap water comes from dams, lakes, rivers, boreholes and sewage works. It is then filtered in bulk to remove muddiness and all sorts of particles floating in the source water. Several processes are typically used to clean the water, such as coagulation, flocculation, sediment filtration and active carbon filtration. This usually occurs on a very large scale (thousands of litres per minute).

The cleaning process described above, if managed properly, produces water that looks clean. However, even though the water may look clean, the vast majority of dissolved chemicals remain in the water, invisible to the eye. The heavy metals, pesticides and other contaminants mentioned above, cannot be removed effectively on a large scale.

Living microorganisms cannot be removed on a large scale either. They can be killed thoroughly by dosing with disinfectants.

So, after the above cleaning process, disinfectants such as chlorine, chloramine or ozone are added to the water to kill practically all living organisms. Of particular importance are the pathogens (viruses, bacteria and parasites), such as cholera, typhoid, e Coli, giardia, etc. This disinfection makes the water safe to drink, biologically speaking, but has very bad chemical consequences.

Water disinfectants are very aggressive chemicals and kill harmful pathogens effectively at the right dosage. But, unfortunately, they also react with pollutants in the water, as well as with the materials they encounter in the pumps, reservoirs and pipes along the way to the end user’s tap. The result? An endless range of chemicals, known as disinfection by-products, that end up in the water. The trihalomethanes (THMs are proven to be carcinogenic) and bromate, among many others, are of particular concern.

When tap water reaches the end-user, there must always remain some active disinfectant in the water to ensure that it is biologically safe. This is called the “residual disinfectant”. The direct effect of this residual disinfectant is yet another big health concern. While drinking water containing residual disinfectants and disinfection by-products is the lesser of two evils (in other words better than risking cholera, typhoid, e Coli, giardia, etc) we strongly recommend that people should educate themselves on the effects of consuming these by-products.

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that many health practitioners strongly discourage drinking tap water for an extended period. It is far better to avoid drinking tap water altogether, anywhere in the world. It is now well established that even showering, bathing or swimming in chlorinated water is directly detrimental to your health.

Even though we advise people NOT to drink tap water, we salute our colleagues at the World Health Organisation and government institutions around the globe, who are doing truly astonishing and commendable work in bulk water specification and treatment. Generally speaking, tap water provides an excellent base for Prepared Water (more on that later). In preparing water for long-term human consumption, many health practitioners believe that additional measures are needed over and above bulk treatment. Our concern goes far beyond the acute effects of pollutants, to those evasive chronic, long-term effects that disinfection by-products, residual disinfectants and free radicals have on our physical and mental health.

Reverse Osmosis (RO) to the Rescue - RO is an amazing technology, capable of curing water of all the concerns mentioned above. A well designed RO plant, including thorough pre- and post-treatment, produces water that is well over 99.9% pure. RO is generally the cornerstone of the prepared water production process.

In a good way, RO “over-achieves” in purifying water, to the extent that the water it produces is “too clean” and unnatural for drinking - too few minerals are left to make a satisfying, thirst-quenching drinking water.

Some Prepared Water manufacturers, therefore, remineralise their ultra-pure RO water. With the right mineral mix, a naturally good-tasting, thirst-quenching drinking water can be produced.

Now on to hydration. On average, people ingest about the same mass of liquid as they do food. If your water or other drinks contain pollutants, you are continually, slowly poisoning yourself. Furthermore, commercially grown food also contains pollutants, adding to that detrimental chemical intake, known as “toxic load”.

The easiest way to reduce one’s toxic load is to drink quality water only, such as a properly prepared re-mineralized ozone-free drinking water that doesn’t contain free radicals. For the average person, that would reduce his toxic load by about 50%, which significantly improves one’s prospects of long-term health.

It is not nearly understood how our long term health is affected by our toxic load. This is a very complex subject. Nonetheless, many health practitioners are convinced that there is a connection, but nobody knows exactly how it works.

However two things are clear: people ingest ever-increasing amounts of pollutants, while society is plagued increasingly by serious illnesses such as ADD, allergies, Alzheimers, arthritis, autism, cancers, cardiovascular disease, dementia, dental problems, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, Parkinson’s disease, pregnancy complications, stress and strokes, to name a few.

While there remains a knowledge gap between cause and effect, prevention is certainly better than cure. Mothers have a particularly special opportunity to instil healthy drinking habits in their children, which will benefit them hugely for the rest of their lives!