Pure Water Filters - Uncover the Truth About Potentially Dangerous Filters You Can Buy in the Stores
If you are like me, you probably don't trust your city water supply and can't believe every wild claim made by the companies that make pure water filters.
What we need is an overview of the products on the market, and a better understanding of how healthy, pure water can be brought into our homes and given confidently to our children. Let me do that for you.
From what I have read, we can divide all pure water systems into two broad groups: those that attempt to make water so pure they even strip out the natural minerals in it, and the others that attempt to filter out particles and the smallest organisms. Neither makes water as safe and healthy as you might expect.
Let's first look at pure water filters that produce demineralizing water.
It's popular for pure water filters to remove minerals as they clean water. It sounds logical, there is some old science that backs it up, and its widely used in large industrial water purification plants. Many city water authorities, for example, give you this water to drink. But it is not healthy.
The easiest way to remove minerals in water is to distill it.
You will remember those high school and college chemistry experiments where water was boiled, turned into gas, passed through a glass coil, and condensed back into water. That's distilling.
While the final sample of distilled water looks clean and definitely does not contain any bacteria, it still contains the synthetic chemicals that boil at a lower temperature than water and it leaves behind the minerals that all water picks up, deep in the earth, as it seeps past pristine rocks and dissolves minute traces of minerals.
Why would you want to remove these trace minerals with a pure water filter?
It's through our drinking water that minerals like calcium, magnesium and potassium get into our bodies. Thank goodness, because we desperately need them and are unwell and unhealthy without them. The World Health Organization concluded not so long ago that "drinking water should contain minimum levels of certain essential minerals." No natural water supply anywhere on earth is mineral-free. There must be a reason for that. I think we can say that distilled water taken over a long term is unhealthy, and the pure water filters that strip out minerals are not recommended.
There's another common way to demineralize water.
You put it through an extremely fine membrane filter using a sophisticated method called reverse osmosis developed 40 or so years ago by the printing industry that needed mineral-free water in some printing processes.
Reverse osmosis became popular in the Middle East after the first oil shock of the 1970s when Arab states had money to spend on industrial sized desalination plants on their coastlines, areas of desert that could be irrigated, and a population which could accept less-than-healthy water for some purposes. Submarines also installed reverse osmosis units.
It works by forcing water through a fine membrane that will block anything with smaller molecules than water.
And therein is the first problem. The molecules of synthetic chemicals like herbicides and pesticides are smaller than the molecules of water. So they go through, into the so-called "pure" water. And the second major problem is that the all-important trace minerals are stopped by the membrane filter. We've just seen that this is not good for us.
The other category of pure water systems are the candle filters we see in commercial advertisements.
Carbon block and granular carbon filters are used in many pure water filters.
These contain effective elements in a loose form, like a handful of sand. These pure water filters work by setting up a process where contaminated particles bond chemically or physically to the surface of the filter. In this fashion the contaminants are absorbed into the filter, or blocked by it. Minerals get through. But so do the microscopic cysts that carry disease and sickness.
A certain type of carbon called activated carbon is the best available at the moment, according to the U.S. EPA. But even that has limitations.
Then, there are multi-media block pure water filters.
These are among the best. They take advantage of what activated carbon can do, and then take purification to the next level. These pure water filters are also composed of materials that will absorb and stop contaminants, but its been compressed into a solid "candle" shape. In addition, these filter units have extremely fine porous barriers that the water has to pass through. This barrier stops sediment and the dangerous Cryptosporidium and Giardia cysts that bring stomach illnesses. By making the active filter solid, this type of system prevents the channeling effect of granular filters, whereby some of the water actually doesn't make physical contact with the active purifying materials in the filter.
So, to sum up, pure water filters can be divided into two groups. Those that take out the healthy trace minerals we need and those that let them through while trying to block synthetic chemicals, bacteria and viruses. In my opinion the second type is better if they have components that stop all harmful contaminants, because our bodies can take in trace minerals by drinking it.
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