Is tap water really bad for your health?

This is just anecdotal evidence, but I’ve been drinking tap water for 58 years and I feel just fine.

You don’t need to spend money on the filter things, just a carafe like leahcim said. Or even bottles: letting them dechlorinate will take longer than with a carafe but it works just the same.

I hear that some places are putting dihydrogen monoxide in our water supply. Disgusting!

Note that some places treat it in addition or substitution with chloramine(s), which does not break down in light.

Whilst it’s a little off topic and doesn’t specifically relate to Chlorine, -amine, Fluorine or Fluoride, I used to work at a facility where we desalinated our own water for process use. Some 50GL per annum. Anyway we Reserve Osmosis-ed the bejesus out of this water until it was pretty much just raw H20. Then we’d pump it some 30km to various parts of our plant. Go forward 18 months, and the 600mm dia steel pipe that never had anything but pure water in it started pissing out water everywhere. Pinholes all through it.

Turns out removing all those lovely little minerals and chemicals turned that water into a monster for steel pipe - corroding the hell out of it very rapidly. Perhaps corrosion is not the right word, maybe ionization, leach agent, or something? Very expensive design flaw as it turned out!

Anyway a similar thing happens to the human body if the water is too pure, it leaches all sorts of required minerals and chemicals out of your body. So all that branding by the water companies “pure” “distilled” “virginal” - if the water was really that pure, it’d kill you in short order. Maybe not one or two bottles, but if its all you drank for a few days, weeks? As I understand it, you’d be dead.

In her book Poisoning Our Children, Nancy Sokol Green (who supposedly suffers from multiple chemical sensitivities) tells the tale of going into a friend’s bathroom and suddenly have a “reaction” to the cleaning products in it. She told her friend, who pointed out there were no cleaning products in her bathroom.

So Green decided she was having a reaction to the chlorinated water in the toilet!

People believe what they want to believe.

We have a Doper who claims to have drunk mostly water these past few years, and the only water she drinks is the distilled variety. As I said, for years. Still alive last I knew.

See… even if the water is 100% pure going into your body it won’t stay that way as soon as it hits your saliva, mucus, stomach, etc. Plus, you probably eat along with drinking at least some of the time. And the lining of your digestive track is constantly renewing itself, unlike the lining of those steel pipes you mention. So no, drinking 100% pure water will not be lethal to a human being assuming they still eat, which will replace anything “leached” out by the water through the normal kidney filtration process.

It contains infinitesimal quantities of everything that is bad for you-therefore, it is GOOD for you!:cool:

This is a common but mostly unfounded myth. There are some health impacts of drinking distilled or demineralized water, but they are fairly slow and subtle.

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientschap12.pdf

Technically, drinking pure water (literally pure, not merely distilled) could kill you. You would have to drink it in sufficient quantity to leach enough electrolytes to cause injury. I haven’t yet found anyone who commits to how much water that actually is. The guy in this video clip drank a shot of it and seems to be okay. :smiley:

People who drink distilled water aren’t drinking “pure water.” Pure water is expensive to make, hard to keep clean, and really doesn’t taste good. It’s generated and used for purposes like cleaning semiconductors.

Believe me, LA has been notorious for water issues since the aqueduct was first conceived. :smiley:

I don’t think anyone is trying to say that a diet of bottled water is bad for you in the way that, say, a diet of sugary soda would be bad for you. It’s healthy to drink a certain amount of water, and to some extent, it’s immaterial whether the water comes from your tap or from your delivery service. It should be noted that water utilities are regulated by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Their treatment, testing, and reporting standards and requirements are MUCH higher, and enforced much more rigorously than the bottling industry. Bottled water is regulated under the FDA and to a lower standard of purity.

Bottled water companies are working very hard to convince people that what they sell in their bottles is worth paying 300 to 2000 times more than your tap water. I think people convince themselves of silly things sometimes in their efforts to justify paying that markup.

Relevant comic: On-Demand Hyperloop-Style Water Delivery

Depends where you live and the water source.

In San Jose California I advise people to chew the water before swallowing, the water has an excessive amount of minerals and is very hard.

The North 1st street near the airport and in the downtown area I will not drink tap water. I do not know what is in the water but it eats up brass. A new valve is only good for about 2 years. After two years when the valve will not close properly.

I have a RO filter in my house at the kitchen sink and that is the source of our drinking water.

Taste and “good for you” are two very very very different things, as evidenced by the entirety of the food industry.

Distilled water has low levels of minerals and is not pure in the true meaning.

DI water is pure water and is not safe to drink. If it is pumped in metal pipes it will leach the metal from the pipes. If a person drinks it will leach minerals out of the body, from the saliva, mucus, stomach and the rest of the body. I have seen danger signs identifying DI water lines.

Flat, bland, no taste. But when I was a Midshipman we preferred the distilled water over the water that the water king purchased in Tahiti. Drink a little of that and spend a lot of time in the head.

Let me put it this way: I don’t believe that food and drink should be an ordeal.
I am old enough to remember cod liver oil, which at the time parents told their kids was “good for you” despite its repulsive taste.
I see meals as something one should be able to enjoy, not as a ritual or a duty. I would not want to live a long life with something like that to look forward to. :frowning:

That’s where we used to live!