[1] If you don't already know why homeopathic remedies are complete BS, look up "homeopathic dilution" and the meaning of the markings such as "30X" or "10C" found on these products.
If you were really interested in non-municipal water, the best route to go would be some sort of filtered reverse osmosis setup or something similar, of which you most certainly do not need a Silicon Valley snake oil salesman for. You can also get a home system to make distilled water just for drinking that won't cost that much.
Honestly, the biggest issue that the average person could have with municipal water is it being overly hard. I might get a filtration system in our new place to deal with that. I might also be tempted to get some kind of filtration system for water just for my coffee and tea, simply for taste reasons.
>My digestive track always gets a little messed up when I visit my parents back home
Not necessarily dangerous, but also not an experience I'd pay $6/gallon for.
You need to inspect it (the CDC recommends annually sending away for a water test[1]), but I'm aware of no EPA or CDC recommendation that calls for unconditionally treating the water. You treat well water only if the tests find a problem.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/testi...
https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/trea...
My well water tests high for nitrates, as a healthy adult this is not a problem, but giving my water to babies will kill them. By only drinking the treated water I make accidents less likely because all my habits are to tell people don't drink the water except for the filtered drinking water.
FWIW, as you mention, if it's hard water this is most likely the culprit. Frequently hard water will have high sulfate levels and sulfate (as in saline laxatives) is not generally well absorbed by the human gut.
http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2017/12/21/c...
This aligns pretty well with the ideas of the anti-vaccine movement though.
Well that and, _surely this is a hoax._
The results are predictably going to be national news of the if it bleeds it leads variety... <shakes head>
Can you expand on that at all, what particular ideas do they have that this aligns with. Seems a long way from "vaccines contain stuff that is deleterious to health" [which is sometimes true, though key is that provably carriers in infant vaccines weren't causing Autism] to "we should drink water with unknown pathogens in".
Surely the refusal to put unknown pathogens in your body would align better with the refusal to put unknown vaccine constituents in to your/your child's body?
It seems like the anti-vacc movement makes poor health decisions based on a flawed or limited understanding of science and a strong faith in pseudo-science.
Science says vaccines are good, pseudo-science says that scientists are wrong and vaccines cause autism. Science says fluoridated water is okay, the jury is on on prescription residue, and we have a pretty clear idea of what happens with contaminated water consumption, pseudo-science "look what sort of nasty things science put in your water! Lets go with natural water from dirty sources!"
Edit: It's not about keeping unknown things out of their body, it's about a small group of non-scientists making unfounded allegations that can undermine the efforts society has made to improve the health of humanity (small pox, cholera, etc.)
> Let's call it Live Blockchain Water and watch the cash roll in!
I nearly spit my drink out.
Pay attention to point 16:
> 16. Any disinfection treatment by whatever means and the addition of bacteriostatic elements or any other treatment likely to change the viable colony count of the natural mineral water is prohibited for natural mineral water and spring water.
But really, can this even be sold? What does the FDA do, exactly?
As a regular user of a bread making machine I do wonder if my bread would be improved by the use of this posh salt rather than the table salt I normally use. Would I live longer by not having the anti-caking ingredient added to the teaspoon of salt I use with my bread?
So, after a push of a button and a couple of minutes exactly measuring flour, water, salt, sugar, butter and yeast I get perfect fresh bread. Meanwhile, the mystery individual 'ms Ancedote' goes the whole hog on using overly-good ingredients to make some 'even better bread'. This will be using wholemeal organic spelt flour instead of regular strong wholemeal flour, this will also be measured in 'cups', not weighed. So all the other ingredients are fancy, e.g. the salt, the oven will need to be on for hours and lots of noises and mess will be made. Net result is essentially unrisen bread, the science not understood, the interior still sticky dough, the outer with a thicker and dryer crust than one might want. To my science mind this is madness, a lot of work with ingredients coming from all four corners of the globe, just for some bread that is wrong. All kinds of exciting herbs and what-not could also be added, such 'rustic' fun is the desired thing, it does not taste like store bought bread and that is what matters. The fact it takes five hours to make is part of it. None of it makes sense until you learn the word 'orthorexia':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa
So my mystery friend that makes awful bread and does not want to be making normal bread like I do, why is this? It is just one symptom of a bigger thing going on, orthorexia.
I would say there is a whole industry going on around orthorexia and that these guys are tapping into that market.
I'm not suggesting that it's the water, but I am suggesting that it is not unreasonable to think that something we probably believe is perfectly reasonable or even healthful may be having unforeseen consequences that have yet to be precisely singled out. And so experiments that sound stupid may not be such an awful idea. Penicillin was only accepted long after its discovery. A big part of the reason for that is using a byproduct of blue-green mold to treat vulnerable bacterial infections is something most people intuitively dismissed as idiotic - even after the discoverer presented and published his findings. If there's a market for folks that want to down 'natural' water at a premium, then I think this is a good thing. They get to act as guinea pigs for the whole of society, the guy makes a few bucks, and in the end everybody learns a bit more.
All it takes is someone/thing defecating in the well and you'll get cholera.
Epidemiology literally came about because of "raw water" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfilter...
> (There is no scientific evidence that fluoride is a mind-control drug, but plenty to show that it aids dental health.)
> Talk like Mr. Singh’s disturbs Dr. Donald Hensrud, the director of the Healthy Living Program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. What the raw-water partisans see as dangers, he says, are important safety measures.
> “Without water treatment, there’s acute and then chronic risks,” Dr. Hensrud said, including E. coli bacteria, viruses, parasites and carcinogenic compounds that can be present in untreated water. “There’s evidence all over the world of this, and the reason we don’t have those conditions is because of our very efficient water treatment.”
Admittetly it wouldve been nice if more counter-voices would've been heard even though the purpose of the reader is to acquaint the reader with the movement (assuming - I guess - a certain reasonableness of the reader)
If I were somehow lose access to that water I'd probably try this at least once just to see if it's close.
Edit: Just looked up the exact location, 37.815495, -83.692356
> raw_water == snake_oil
TrueWhen I’ve probed just a little the actual claim I’ve heard is that it somehow affects personality, making for easier to control masses.
I don’t know whether that’s true but at least that’s a claim that can be falsified.
The other thing is:
“Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,”
There’s plenty of evidence for trace amount of estrogen and estrogen-like substances in the water. Maybe that’s not an issue, but it’s also true that testosterone levels in men are declining worldwide. However there can be a number of causes for this, and the two are not necessarily linked.
Not mentioned in this article, but on HN frontpage earlier, there’s tons of micro particles of plastic in oceans, and subsequently wild fish.
I don’t know those subjects enough to make any kind of informed observation… But dismissing all of it as conspiracy theory doesn’t really sound convincing anymore.
While tap water may contain these microparticles of plastic, there's no reason to believe that water out in the wild will be free of them.
Social conditioning works far better, with facebook and twitter its fairly easy to do at scale (see bubble bias)
Tap water (in the uk at least) must be filtered and sterilized, which should remove microplastics.
However, some places just take river water, a rough filter and a massive UV light. (I've been to many a camp site that has this, heavy rains make the water taste different.)
Por que no los dos?
safe water doesn't need to be sterile. In the UK, you are allowed a certain level of "harmless" bacteria. However there are strong laws that are _enforced_ to make sure that people don't get harmed.
Now, there _might_ be a case that "raw" water provides/boosts/promotes certain gut flora in people that is beneficial. However gut flora is a new and little understood science. Applying occam's razor to declining health in the US, and I'd point to two things:
1) increasingly sedentary lifestyle
2) Terrible health system that denies basic care for >60 million people and pumps the rest full of narcotics.
Unlike the gut flora theory, there is a mountain of evidence to back it up, not some bearded weirdo with little connection to the real world.
There's a great distance between cholera and less filtered water. Worldwide the high end estimate of cholera deaths is 130,000 and that is with liberal modeling of unreported deaths. A quick search informs [1] that about 2 billion people a year rely on water that is absolutely contaminated with feces. That's a 0.0065% death rate at the high end. Usage of isolated or private water sources along with basic testing can trivially reduce these risks down to 0. And on that note of giving context to numbers, we should look at things like the opioid epidemic. In the US in 2015 about 15,000 people died from all opioids. Even if we assume that it was 0 before, which it was not, that would not explain the ongoing decline in life expectancy. The real reason is mortality rates from a wide array of diseases including 8 of the top 10 killers, heart disease in particular, continue to rapidly grow alongside our unhealthfulness. And that was after they had been in decline for decades.
The agency does not wish to take this position but was required to by an act of congress sponsored by that notable scientist and physician Orrin Hatch. You ask what his medical qualifications are? Campaign $$$ of course (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/us/politics/21hatch.html )
Despite this the agency has still managed to come down hard on unsubstantiated medical claims by some homeopathic rip off artists. But basically $25 Bn can fund a lot of laws to hurt the public.
It’s easy to attack snake oil. The meta reference is a bit more amusing, because it has a recursive flavor. It also directly attacks the ethics of the business itself.
Hmm, Wikipedia tells me the studies have been low quality as to whether it's harmful in any way. EC don't recommend using fluoridation of drinking water as they see no benefit when topical application is available ...
With such an important aspect of public health it strikes me as curious in the extreme that there aren't many high-quality studies?? That alone gets me concerned that something is being hidden ... is it any surprise that this would be a widespread concern?
>a small group of non-scientists making unfounded allegations //
The Autism-Vaccination issue was initially scientists raising a concern; in what appeared to be reasonable research. Until the USAmerican removal of mercury containing compounds from the vaccine and the subsequent lack of effect on autism levels I'd say it was still an open question [happy to be corrected on that, I've only looked back on the issue]. It turned out to be an [apparent] correlation without a causative link, but we had to wait a couple of years for that to come back - then there was large scale data.