Everything You Need To Know About Tap & Bottled Water

Happy Monday 8%er!

This edition we are going deep into the bowels of something that has garnered significant attention: water, of all kinds. An especially important topic since April when the EPA placed the first national limit on the amount of PFAS (forever chemicals) that can be in our water. Donald Trump and RFK have made it a point that they want to remove or significantly lower the amount of fluoride in the drinking water on the basis that it reduces people's intelligence, promotes bone cancer and arthritis. Tap water aside, we will also review other kinds, like reverse osmosis and bottled water.

How water filtration works:

Before putting these waters on the tipping scale, we want to lay out the generic steps that make water drinkable. These are the steps to doing so:

Coagulation and Flocculation: Chemicals like aluminum sulfate are added to the ‘raw’ water to help clump particles together (coagulation). At the same time, the water is being slowly churned so that the clumps become bigger and bigger (flocculation).
Sedimentation: The clumps eventually sediment at the bottom. This makes the next step a lot easier.
Filtration: First a sand filter followed by fine filters to remove remaining impurities. After this there is usually an active carbon filter that helps to neutralize the taste and capture organic contaminants.
Disinfection: Usually done with chlorine, killing practically all pathogens in the water, and prevents them from proliferating afterwards.
Water Softening: This process helps the water taste better, either by adding chemicals that make different minerals like calcium, magnesium and iron precipitate to the bottom of the tank, or by using ion exchange resins. This removes almost all these minerals. In some cases there may need to be desalination here as well.
pH Adjustment: If the water is too acidic or basic it can corrode the water pipes, bringing heavy metals into your drinking water. This step is crucial to make sure that the water gets to houses uncontaminated.

Great, now we’re up to speed. The first thing on our list is at-home water purifiers. This, for most people, is that impossibly heavy pitcher you put your water in. Usually they include microfiltration, active carbon or ion exchange resins or a mix of all of them. They’re great initially, but here are the problems with them.

You need to change the filter frequently. Water pitcher filters are effective at first, but rapidly become ineffective and even harmful with time. They need to be changed roughly every 40 gallons, which, for a family of 4 where each member of the family drinks just 6 glasses a day, that would mean that the filter will last less than a month. How many people do you know change the filter that often? Yeah, unfortunately not many.

Secondly, we need to keep in mind these are some powerful filters, and they even remove chlorine. As bad as chlorine in your water sounds, it’s there for a reason: bacteria. Without it, bacteria will start to thrive and multiply after 24h. For some of us that are more forgetful, leaving the water in the pitcher for a few days, that could mean taking a gulp full of millions of bacteria! Yum!

Lastly, using these pitchers or similar at-home filters means we remove even more minerals from our water. Tap water has already been softened in most cases, so by filtering it again you are effectively reducing the mineral content even further, which is not ideal taking into account that most people are deficient in at least one.

This said, of course you can make the pitcher work, but it takes work.

Tap Water:

Ah yes, tap water, a controversial conversation topic at best (and probably the reason you decided to read this edition). From fluoride and side effects to microplastics, let’s see if this is really a topic best had over some tin-foil hats.

Let’s give the fluoride debate a wack. Recently, the US has been compared to Europe’s tap water situation given they add less than half of what we add here. This has sparked debate on the side effects of consuming so much fluoride, especially for the younger population. The more recurring of these is reduced IQ. RFK has made this a major point in his reasoning to reduce the fluoride amounts in our tap water. Seems like the right thing to do if this is true. Let’s look at some numbers, shall we?

EU fluoride levels in tap water can go anywhere from 0-1.2mg/liter. In Spain, the UK and Ireland, fluorination levels range from 0.8-1.2mg/liter (GOV) . These ranges go well above the 0.7mg/liter that the US Department of Health recently recommended (waterboards). This of course proves that the US may be even more conservative with fluoride than Europe.

Before going any further, we need to explain why we even have fluoride in our tap water. Some say it’s wrong, others say it's necessary. We’ll let the facts speak for themselves here. For one, “only trace amounts of fluoride are naturally present in most foods, and most foods not prepared with fluoridated water provide less than 0.05 mg/100 g”(NlH). That’s right, we actually need fluoride in our diets, but we don’t get much from food that is. Keeping in mind that the established RDA is 3 mg and 4mg a day for women and men respectively. You would need to eat roughly 12 pounds of food to reach these numbers on a (daily basis). And for those who didn’t already know, RDA is the minimum amount of a nutrient to avoid deficiencies, not a maximum. So, if 12 pounds of food seems like a little much, we’ll move onto option B. Luckily, the government caught onto this nuance and decided to add fluoride to the tap water millions of Americans drink from. This would curb the rampant prevalence of osteoporosis and tooth decay. See the below graph that sums it up nicely:

You may think this graph is irrelevant because all western countries, irrespective of the amount of fluoride in their water, have had a large reduction in tooth decay, and they would be right. Hopefully, most people brush their teeth at least once per day with fluoride toothpaste, effectively removing cariogenic substances on and in between their teeth, providing a protective fluoride coat. So if we’re already doing all the work here, why do we need more in our water? Well it goes beyond your teeth. Unfortunately, for the 12.6% of American adults over 50 years old, you can't put toothpaste on your hip bones! So unless you are eating toothpaste, you are depriving yourself from an essential mineral that is inversely correlated with osteoporosis. Fluoride helps stimulate osteoblasts (the cells that make bone) and keeps your bones strong and healthy. So fluoride turns out to be a pretty neat thing!

That said, recently there have been claims linking osteosarcoma (a very rare bone cancer) and increased fluoride in tap water. However, the bulk of these studies are retrospective. This means that they look back at community rates of osteosarcoma before and after fluorination, and the thing is, cancers have increased drastically in the last few decades. So just because fluoride consumption has increased, that doesn’t mean it has caused cancer (because cancer has and is on an untrend). This is one of the main arguments against fluoride that also happens to be practically baseless. This is because although it is true that osteosarcoma has increased substantially, cancers across the board of all types have had exponential growth in the past decades. So generally speaking, fluoride within the recommended amounts is perfectly healthy and recommendable.

Now onto what seems straight out of George Orwell’s 1984: are we getting dumber from too much fluoride? Well you may be surprised to know this one is true. But there are some important nuances. First of all, the levels at which this does occur is when drinking water contains over 1.5mg of fluoride per liter, quite a bit above what the US adds. This may still worry you, but let us remind you of saturated fats, for example. This fat is responsible for atherosclerosis and increasing cardiovascular disease across the board. At the same time, we need them in our diet, given it’s essential to our health. So is it the fat that’s bad or just our habits? Too much of anything is bad, the key with nutrition, as always, is moderation. The same goes with fluoride, too much is bad but you need some.

With that out of the way, we can move onto the next pressing question: does tap water have microplastics? The answer is yes, roughly 5.5 particles per liter of tap water (extension). As we know microplastics are literally everywhere, and making sure that we are cautious of this is a growing necessity. An effective way to reduce the microplastic content in tap water is to use at-home water filters, making sure you use them the right way like we mentioned above. There’s not much going on with microplastics in tap water, but there is in bottled water. Let’s get into it!

Bottled Water:

This is the Louis Vuitton of the water world, costing over 30 times what regular tap water does. So other than resolving sudden thirst at the expense of a few dollars, is there any good reason to exclusively drink it?

Less microplastics of course! Oh, nevermind that’s for tap water. This bottled alternative has over 325 particles per liter if it’s in a plastic bottle. Yes, PET plastics are incredibly stable, but they require specific storage conditions to make sure that it doesn’t break down or migrate into the water. The main contributors to this would be sunlight and heat.

That said, bottled water does have less fluoride than tap water. Not only that, it has less chlorine which to some of our more health conscious readers would be of interest. So bottled water is more expensive than tap water, and definitely comes with its downsides, but has less chlorine and possibly more minerals.

Reverse Osmosis:

Also called RO water this is pretty much distilled water. Not exactly distilled because the methods of producing them are different and RO water does have some minerals while distilled has practically none. So is this a good thing? Yes and no. RO water is great at removing pathogens, contaminants like chlorine, heavy metals and others. The bad part is that in the process of removing all of that you also remove the good minerals like magnesium, calcium, etc. Not only that but RO water is slightly more acidic than normal tap water, making us more prone to negative processes like osteoporosis.

In summation RO water is probably the best way to get almost completely inert water, and an easy way to solve the issue of having moot mineralization is by adding it yourself before drinking or cooking with it!

The Mineral Problem:

All of the waters mentioned above have essential minerals removed to improve taste and water appearance. To add insult to injury, the amount of minerals that we include in our diet is progressively less and less as time goes on. It's a vicious cycle where almost every part of our diet has been affected by mineral depletion:

Our drinking water has removed minerals.
Natural foods have less minerals due to growing in depleted soils, since they are the base of our food chain the deficiency catches up to us at the tippy top.
Processed food has a fraction of the amount of nutrients that it had preprocessing.

The OmniBlue Solution:

Now that we understand what water treatment consists of, what most drinking waters are and do and the true negative side effects of most of them, let's talk about what you can do to address the major issue that we illustrated above. Probably the easiest way to improve your nutritional adequacy and overall health is to make sure that your micronutrients are all covered. Most mineral supplements contain just a few essential minerals, but ours don't. By delivering over 70 trace and essential minerals your body has all the tools that it needs for optimal functioning.

You can add OmniBlue to your diet easily by choosing to add OceanElements or OmniBlue Original to your daily drinking water or incorporate in any one of your meals. Our minerals like aqueous solutions, so it is best to dilute and dissolve in sauces, purees, soups, smoothies, etc.

This brings us to our next question: Which should you take? Are they the same? The short answer is no, they are not the same. OmniBlue Original, our liquid mineral complex has a composition that is exceptionally high in ionic magnesium (A mineral that over 50% of Americans don’t get enough of) and has a relevant proportion of the rest of the essential minerals. OceanElements is our star remineralization aid, one quick glance at the nutrition facts and you will see that it does have a smaller proportion of magnesium than OmniBlue Original. That is because the rest of the product by weight includes the rest of the microminerals that are so hard to get into your diet. Minerals like magnesium, molybdenum, manganese, chromium, boron, etc. In essence, OmniBlue Original is remineralized with emphasis on the magnesium intake and OceanElement has a large proportion of daily magnesium but highlights the rest of the essential minerals that are often overlooked.

Final Thoughts

Phew, what a load of information! Now that you know the differences, you can make the right decision for you and your health. We understand this is a lot to go through, and we’re open to answering any questions you may have on the subject. We’ll be all ears!

Have a great week!