Water contamination is one of the main day-to-day sources of health hazards that people face today, the others being air and food contamination. These health hazards exist in varying levels all over the world, some places more than others, in some cases less, much thanks to environmentalist organizations that have put pressure on governments to regulate and install the required sewage cleaning etc.
While a spontaneous and completely sane reaction to this is to save oneself by privately installing filters, buying organic etc. these are problems that ultimately and obviously require collective solutions, i.e. by government and through treaties between governments.
But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that any government action is likely to be met with equal and opposite reaction (in the west), a reaction that seems to stem in large part and primarily from a section of society that lives by the adage "Après moi, le déluge", and secondarily from the section of the populace that has been spoon-fed conspiracy theories (by the former?) about the government and its nefarious nature.
I suspect there are readers here that might disagree with the above, and it's not my intention to start a flame war. Instead I'd be interested to hear if there are any rational reasons why the government should not be given adequate means to regulate and follow up that regulation with the required inspections to make sure toxins are not released into the general environment that forms the basis of our, as well as other biological, present and future, life.
Coronavirus has convinced me that most of the world (and the USA in particular) totally lack the ability and will to act boldly and collectively in response to an emergency. The Climate Change folks were making this exact point for years but I only started believing it after seeing government after government fail to control the pandemic. Most governments were either too slow or too cowardly to make and enforce major societal behavior changes for the good of everyone.
We should consider ourselves lucky that it was “only” a moderately-deadly disease, and not something worse. I can imagine government’s reaction to a space alien invasion: Day 100, after most cities are destroyed, government is still weighing the pros and cons of taking action, and debating whether or not to write a resolution condemning the alien attack.
> Coronavirus has convinced me that most of the world (and the USA in particular) totally lack the ability and will to act boldly and collectively in response to an emergency.
Hmm. My opinion is that dealing with free agents is difficult and governments don't have enough tools to encourage a free society to act in their best interests (let alone society's). Especially when there are numerous bad actors that have a lot of power.
New Zealand and Australia seem to have done well enough. Though I accept the physical isolation of those countries makes it politically easier to make harder decisions.
It's not just the public health measures thethey were bad at. After more than six months, the US still could not do better than direct payments to individuals and businesses. During that time, a competent organization would have found targeted and efficient ways to stimulate the economy. All the Feds know how to do at this point is dump cash.
> We should consider ourselves lucky that it was “only” a moderately-deadly disease, and not something worse.
A lot of people think that the governmental reactions are slow and lame because covid isn’t a disease morbid enough to threaten civilization, as something like a full blown ebola pandemic for example could be. Which is probably true to extent.
But I agree 100% with you and people are crazy to think that governments would somehow suddenly be competent in handling a worse disaster than covid, given the complete (almost) worldwide failure to curb this plague. From initial downplaying and silencing scientists and doctors in China, to rise of anti-mask and anti-vaccine crowds and even voices in governments, to our incapability as a global world to handle the production and logistics of the vaccinations... when a disaster worse than covid strikes in the future, it will be the same shitshow, only with higher stakes
The government is inept, and will often do symbolic token gestures. Plastic is a big case in point. They are going for useless plastic bag bans, and plastic straw bans instead of the real issues.
Clothes made from recycled plastic bottles (yay recycling(?) are shedding fibers into our waters as they are washed. How is that ok?
Now just to be clear, one thing I saw in the US which I found pretty disturbing, was those small plastic bags used for fruits. Sometimes they were so low quality that they visibly shed little chunks of plastic. I'm fully behind banning those.
But as flawed as government is, I guess it's still better than nothing.
Plastic ban bags have made a huge difference in many countries. In much of the developing world, it used to be the case that discarded plastic bags were lying everywhere, flying along, stuck en masse to any barbed-wire fence, etc. Once the bans came in, the level of such pollution has visibly dropped.
Indeed. Straws were symbolic and their ban has little effect, but the bag bans are amazing and in some countries the plastic cup bans are almost as effective at reducing trash on the street.
There are environmentally beneficial effects to these but there are also significant effects on overall litter. It's like when soda can manufacturers switched their tab system to one that doesn't get discarded.
This! Plastic bag bans have been a massive quality of life improvement in nearly every city I visit regularly.
I am not sure what the impact of plastic straw bans has been. Beyond just the symbolism, however, they would have been a useful step towards reconsidering the use of all single use plastic if COVID hadn’t picked up when it did.
i totally agree. in Ireland we had a lot of grumbling about it at the time but the impact on plastic pollution in the streets and fields and roads has been massive.
plastic straw ban has little impact mostly because people tend to leave their drinks in the fast food restaurant rather than take them home. it't not as obvious that it's helping and aren't the cups coated in plastic?
There should be government regulations (perhaps including more regulation of drinking water). But the torturous political process that is currently required to enact those regulations is a good thing and the gist of your post, "just sweep aside all the nihilistic whiners stonewalling and fix the problem," is the wrong approach. My perspective is liberal: there are no good, simple solutions, there's no such thing as a "general will," people don't agree, have good reasons to not agree, and therefore the political squabbling, as tiring as it is, is healthy.
Buried within your perspective is, I believe, the incorrect and somewhat dangerous idea that there is a way to harmonize society if only we'd grant the right powers to the right people. I think civilization is best thought of as a tragic compromise and attempts to make it something else never end well.
None of that is to say you're wrong to advocate for more and better regulations. Only that there are valid reasons to argue for fewer regulations or to be skeptical about the government's ability to regulate this or that.
In the US at least, buying organic won't necessarily save you. Whether something's actually organic is highly dependent on whether the farmers and grocers actually adhere to the guidelines.
You could theoretically be audited, but I never saw or heard of a single audit in the 4-5 years I worked in produce at a national grocery chain. Granted, this was over 10 years ago. But given the regulatory climate in over those years, I would be shocked if enforcement was made stricter.
That's also ignoring the fact that non-organic farming began in part as a way to more cheaply and efficiently grow food, thereby supporting a larger population. It might be hard to unwind that clock simply because of the food demands of the current human population.
> But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that any government action is likely to be met with equal and opposite reaction (in the west), a reaction that seems to stem in large part and primarily from a section of society that lives by the adage "Après moi, le déluge", and secondarily from the section of the populace that has been spoon-fed conspiracy theories (by the former?) about the government and its nefarious nature.
I think this is perhaps a vast oversimplification, driven by a desire to attribute to nilhilism and idiocy/impressionability what may actually be deeper philosophical differences, held sincerely by intelligent people.
It seems pretty common these days to ascribe people's differing philosophical viewpoints to misinformation, conspiracy theories, foreign influence, or whatever.
It's possible that reasonable, intelligent people, just like you, simply disagree on the best ways to address these problems, and that it's not as simple as that they've been "spoon-fed conspiracy theories".
(Source: I'm one of the people in that camp. Government regulation is one tool in the drawer, but it's not a very good one for causing sweeping societal change, IMO. Tesla, for example, did vastly more for the move to automotive electrification than all of the previous US government attempts up to that point.)
This giants are building on the back of research done in Universities all over the world and Tesla benefited by government money (so how the f** Tesla gets the praises and the government gets the reverse m the exact funcking thing with God, you get ill blame it on the Devil or yourself, you get saved by doctors and science then go thank God because of the miracle he did)
Probably both are needed, just makes no sense that Tesla fanboys would try to spin a governments are bad while Tesla is sucking a lot of money from many governments programs around the world and the green electricity was made possible by the green programs and taxes on polution.
Good point. And perhaps government could learn from this that taxes and incentives are their most powerful tools to fight global warming. A carbon tax (which starts small but over the years becomes punitive) would be the most powerful move of all
> Government regulation is one tool in the drawer, but it's not a very good one for causing sweeping societal change
So you at least acknowledge a role for the government in this. Just as I acknowledge that private companies can have a positive impact. Maybe what we both need to do is to isolate the hardline extremists in each camp (people that can only see government solutions in one, and people that can only see private solutions in the other), and find rational solutions to the problem. Which is sort of what I want to accomplish with this thread, sorry if it was over the top provocative.
> So you at least acknowledge a role for the government in this.
No.
I mean, "attempt to kill everyone who doesn't agree precisely with me, and take over the whole world and run it precisely the way I see fit" is also a tool in the drawer. Acknowledging the fact that some people choose to take that path, and that it is a tool that this tool-using species uses sometimes, does not in any way signal my acceptance or endorsement of such a choice.
I don't think that everyone that is entirely opposed to government-based solutions to the problem (or even entirely opposed to the concept of a government or a state in general) is a "hardline extremist".
Aha, I see. Well, extremism is a relative term, depending on environment. In certain cryptocurrency circles I'm sure your stance is normal, in society at large it's rather extreme though, as is equating "kill everyone who doesn't agree with me" with government action in any way.
The problem with this line of argument from my point of view is you oppose and obstruct highly needed government action on principle, without providing an alternative solution. The plan to offer billionaires a new start on other planets doesn't count as an alternative, sorry.
But as mentioned before, if you have an alternative solution to the problem of the constantly accumulating toxins in the environment that subtracts government action from the equation up your sleeve, I'm all ears.
> Well, extremism is a relative term, depending on environment
Sure, but "hardline extremist" means something in particular, and is not a generic term to refer to any outlying behavior or view.
You can't label someone a "hardline extremist" (with all of the associated connotation that entails) for having reasonable views shared by many millions of others, and then pedal it back with "it's a relative term".
> is you oppose and obstruct highly needed government action
Nobody's obstructing anything, first off, but I absolutely oppose action that's undertaken at gunpoint (or threat of same). There are vastly better ways (from a standpoint of morality, efficiency, and effectiveness) of getting people to act in coordination in their own interests than threatening them with guns and cages, which is the only authority a government has to achieve things.
I really appreciate that you’re open to a conversation, it made for an interesting thread.
I can offer an alternate solution to accumulating toxins, which may or may not be comprehensive: Property rights.
Pollution is a tragedy of the commons situation. If people owned, not just land, but whatever encompasses the pollution, there would be incentive not to pollute their own property.
So my proposed solution would require defining property in a way that includes ownership of the pollution.
Government enforces property rights, so this does rely partly on government.
Alright, let’s say it was possible to track all pollution to its polluter, and you could assign ownership. Then what? Tax or fine the polluters? Isn’t that basically the same as regulating the polluting industries in the first place?
So what tool would you rather use, rather than our special-purpose tool for collective action?
How is "don't have the government regulate anything and hope that individuals spontaneously organize into a solution with no input" any different than not doing anything at all?
>I don't think that everyone ...entirely opposed to the concept of a government or a state in general is a "hardline extremist".
Oh. Oddly, most people do find anarchy an extreme position.
Government is not an effective tool for societal change in democracies because, by definition, they require society to want those changes. For instance, although homosexuality has been a political issue for decades, gay marriage was never legalized until a majority of the population supported it. Private enterprise provided support for "significant others" long before this happened. Private enterprise is on the leading edge of many changes today: How many genders can you identify as on Facebook? ...how about at the DMV?
> I don't think that everyone that is entirely opposed to government-based solutions to the problem (or even entirely opposed to the concept of a government or a state in general) is a "hardline extremist".
It sort of does though... for the purpose of this discussion the spectrum runs from: all-government-regulated to all-individually-accomplished.
So basically falling into either extreme of the spectrum (which by definition declines any other mid-point solution) is exactly the definition of “hardline extremist”.
Arguing otherwise seems to me more like you haven’t made your peace with it.
...in my personal opinion such views still have a very valid role to play in the discussion, but any successful solution will lie somewhere in the middle.
> for the purpose of this discussion the spectrum runs from: all-government-regulated to all-individually-accomplished.
I've spotted the issue. This is a false dichotomy. The government is just an abstraction over a group, like any other; literally nobody who is suggesting that government-based solutions aren't good are advocating for individual accomplishment outside of groups.
The government has no hands and no brain; all actions undertaken under color of the state are carried out by "individual" humans.
Nobody's saying that coordination amongst people in large groups isn't required.
If there is a 'spectrum', it's "individuals" vs "groups", or it's "compulsory groups, on threat of violence" (the state) vs "voluntary association" (how almost every other group in our society works - and 100% of the effective ones).
You can't meaningfully threaten world-class, creative, hardworking people into being maximally efficient and effective. You need a carrot, not a stick, and the only solutions the state provides are based on their ability to print cash (already not a problem if you're effective and productive), or a stick.
> Tesla, for example, did vastly more for the move to automotive electrification than all of the previous US government attempts up to that point.
A tax on fossil fuels raising the price multiple fold would quickly align everyone’s incentives to create less pollution. The parameters of the world don’t necessarily allow for the time required for market participants to come up with solutions or care about future generations.
The difference is a tax on fossil fuels reduces quality of life for sufficient people that exist now. Therefore it’s unpopular, and not even possible to enact unless in a dictatorship or the populace accepts the idea that they need to reduce their consumption to benefit future generations.
Please tell me when in history it was companies leading the way into better working conditions, equal access to healthcare, better representation in government?
I am also interested how you propose that sweeping societal change can come from something different than a elected representative government by the people, for the people?
Tesla got a large amount of government subsidies and tax incentives, both federally and at the state level. Tesla would have gone bankrupt many years ago without the government.
Government regulation is precisely the thing that accelerates societal change. It's maybe the sharpest tool for that. Remember CFCs and the ozone layer? If you manage to point a government in the right direction it's a juggernaut. The problem is that by design it's hard to steer.
But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that any government action is likely to be met with equal and opposite reaction
We have yet to see government action that was thoughtful, well communicated, consistent, and devoid of politics. If the government could accomplish such a thing I see no reason why it would need to be met with equal and opposite reaction.
> Water contamination is one of the main day-to-day sources of health hazards that people face today, the others being air and food contamination.
I'll second this. I'm on the path at spending about $20 per month for fairly clean water and $20 a month for the air. I haven't solved the food contamination problem as I didn't have my sights on it but I'll include it now (I have been trying to cook at home more over the past two years, so maybe I've been taking baby steps here without realizing it).
As for the government, re:regulation, I'm trying to shy away from the politics because (at least for America) it's burdened down by identity politics instead of policy focused discussions.
As for me and my house, we're doing our part to bare the costs of personal responsibility.
You could not bath in the river Rhein in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. That changed through the political green movement and the institutionalization of their ideas. Now you can bath again in those rivers, and drink water from a tap without being afraid - unfortunately, a lot of producing industries have moved on to greener, cheaper pastures, where ecologic and environmental, let alone human protection is not really at a high standard.
The approach to deal with the "Après moi, le déluge" and conspiracy people is a tricky one. Only partly in can be covered with an economic (private jet tax, rejection of clinic entry/travel to people who are not vaccinated) and educational approach - but we are far from being close to an optimum here. Democracies need educated and politically mature people in order to be stable in the long term, and strong institutions that can bring forward a healthy discourse.
There needs to be a better way to correct a government agency that isn't doing what it's supposed to besides waiting for the next election, because that doesn't seem to work.
Of course there is. Write to your representatives on relevant committees and indicate, in specific ways, how the agency is not representing the interests of your community. Encourage other members of your social group to do the same. There are also meta representatives, like the administrators of political party you identify with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp4h-3vQafk
I pretty much assume that any letter I would ever write to my representative goes directly to the shredder unread if it doesn’t come with at least a $1000 check.
Nitpick pile on: Bath (capital B) is a place. A bath is optionally an abbreviation of bath-tub, or some sort of past tense conjugation of bathe 'I had a bath' that I am insufficiently skilled in grammer to identify.
"I had a bath in Bath" is ambiguous as to whether you previously owned a person sized water container, or made use of the city's famous roman bathing facilities.
Baths can be had and also taken. Unfortunately “I took a bath in Bath.” is triply ambiguous in that it might mean that you stole plumbing, that you cleaned yourself via water immersion or that you lost a significant amount of money.
Without further context, people will gravitate towards the commonly used meaning, so it would typically be interpreted as “cleaned yourself via water immersion”.
One of the great things about English (and other languages) is that you don't need to speak or write with perfect grammar and usage in order to be understood.
I understand the irritation with errors though as they read like visual noise.
I like 'nitpick' as a verb though, and also 'go over with a fine-toothed comb' - a method for both literal and figurative nit-picking.
Oof I think you couldn't be more wrong on this point. I think environmental contamination is the issue that most strongly can unite both left and right.
Believing more in conspiracy is actually a great reason to mistrust the water supply. Given that men's testosterone and sperm rates have been falling for decades (with no cause known, but best hypothesis is chemicals in environment)[1], I particularly expect there to be a common ground.
After all, Alex Jones (right-wing, conspiracy theory nut) has been concerned about a herbicide named atrazine that arguably can change the gender of frogs (he mistakenly said turn them gay). "A 2010 Hayes study concluded that atrazine rendered 75% of male frogs sterile and turned one in 10 into females,"[2] and atrazine is just one of many such man-made "xenoestrogens" [3].
In fact, I'm a bit shocked how slow both sides are to start caring about this issue.
Watch Dark Waters if you haven't, which tells the story of a lawyer who broke the case against Dupont producing forever chemicals in huge quantities long after the evidence was overwhelming they cause cancer, birth defects, endocrine disruption, and more.
When the Senate questioned General Austin, today named Secretary of Defense, they asked him about forever chemicals because they've contaminated military bases so much.
Same for BPA. Widely used, now it's know to be an endocrine disrupter, now that there's a public outcry they've switched to some other undisclosed chemical that probably does the same thing (as a chemical analogue) or some other bad thing that will take 50 years to figure out.
It's gonna keep happening until we flip the regulatory model on its head and require companies to prove the chemicals they're using are safe, which will never happen, because god forbid we don't let capitalism poison us all so we can have non-stick pans.
The weird thing is that this explosion of new chemical compounds has really only happened in the last 120 years or so. It never used to be a given that we had to do things this way.
After a lifetime of drinking Los Angeles tap water I purchased a RO system, this was 13 years ago when my wife was pregnant with the first child. It has been one of the best things I have ever purchased. Just the taste improvement alone makes it worth it.
I first tried it at a friends house who used it for a aquarium and skipped the di stage for drinking water.
I bought mine from air,water,ice. These aquarium guys do not mess around, the units are much better than what you find in Home Depot and the refills are reasonably priced. Most units come with a ‘turbo’ pump so you are not wasting water as pressure in the storage tank increases.
Do you / how do you remineralize the water? I've heard it leaches minerals from your body if you don't (that's why drinking distilled water long term is also not recommended).
Reading a couple of times, my best interpretation is that the degree sign ° got mangled into 0. So the phrases should be: "water temperatures of 15–35 °C best satisfied physiological needs. Water temperatures above 35° or below 15 °C resulted in a reduction in water consumption".
So basically if one creates +- distilled water by home purification all is fine, since we don't notice different taste (our child doesn't complain and neither does my pregnant wife, in contrary) and we don't use some metal piping to transfer it. Funny how slightly different distilled water behaves, ie tea leaves take much longer to release its content.
Potentially beneficial minerals in the water can be easily substituted with a food supplement tablets if one feels food intake is inadequate.
Minimizing PFOS to practically 0 on top of god knows what other pollution could be in it still sounds like a great idea. I wouldn't care about this if I was 60+, but we are far from it and our kid(s) deserve a bit less pollution in their most fragile stage of life. Heck, all kids do.
Huh. It is interesting to read this study that claims all kinds of bad things happen with water below 50 ppm TDS. I've been drinking Seattle tap water (under 50 ppm TDS) for over 50 years and have never heard anyone suggest we need to add minerals to our water to avoid these risks, or that our tap water poses any health risks whatsoever.
Is it really possible that lower TDS makes better water and better water makes better beer and coffee?
I guess that could make it a double-blind test.
I wonder how significant the number of participants is over what length of time and how it compares to the numbers and species in the laboratory rodent work.
I agree, it's more like a legend for the underdeveloped world, especially the more rural parts which suffer from all kinds of deficiencies.
Of course I'm going to take it "with a grain of salt" when one of the authors' introductory bullet points is
Distilled water has poor taste characteristics.
Which I have long known to be patently false, regardless of the hundreds of sources of demineralized water I have enjoyed or been responsible for. In a properly functioning system, poor taste has never been a characteristic ever.
Although I'll admit you have to know how to run a still.
Theoretically each "insoluble" mineral like mercury or lead is regarded that way because they commonly form various compounds which various chemists throughout history have tried to dissolve in otherwise mineral-free water.
These compounds are considered insoluble since you can put in a gram to a liter of DI water, stir it all you want, filter out what didn't dissolve and get back a whole gram.
Or you can put in a millgram and get back a whole milligram.
That's not the kind of everyday behavior you're going to get from compounds of Sodium, Potassium, Calcium & Magnesium. These life-giving minerals are very soluble by comparison to the life-compromising minerals like mercury & lead.
Many milligrams up to many grams of these good mineral compounds like potassium can easily dissolve in a liter of mineral-free water.
But nobody would drink mineral water that strong, it would taste worse than sea water.
However in fact when there is no mineral shortage there is also no significant difference in the amount of the good minerals that will dissolve in most average tap water versus DI water.
Therefore unless your primary source of beneficial minerals is from water alone, the difference between drinking mineral-free water versus tap water or even stronger popular mineral waters will not be mathematically measurable in a meaningful way.
Your total mineral intake relative to outflow is what determines your position on a spectrum of dynamic equilibrium for each mineral, regardless of whether the minerals come from water or food. This is not a complex concept, you wouldn't do a marathon any better on tap water than DI water when you really need something like Gatorade at least.
You really can never let the life-giving minerals become depleted down to your last milligrams or you would be dead. And no mineral water alone is enough to replace the normal amount you need coming through your system. That's why Gatorade was invented for those extreme times.
So almost everybody has always gotten most of their essential everyday minerals from their food, and unless the water has some beneficial minerals that the food does not, it makes no difference if it was replaced with DI water instead.
Water-soluble vitamins are not much diferent and need to be constantly replaced to maintain a good level, that's why Vitamin Water was invented in later decades as the food got bleaker, and you're not likely to get tap water with vitamins anytime soon.
Maybe I shouldn't give anybody any harebrained ideas for a startup.
OTOH with toxic minerals which you might want to flush out of your system, things like mercury or lead are actually saturating the water when you try to dissolve a milligram so they're not truly insoluble, you just can't measure the infintesimally miniscule amount that actually did dissolve before the water became saturated and will take up no more of that particular mineral.
But these are harmful minerals where micrograms are undesirable, and known to accumulate in living things, which can somewhat be attributed to their near-insolubility so if there's any hope of preventing or reducing any long-term accumulation it would have to be somewhat dependent on excreting more than is imbibed over the long term instead. No quick answer could ever be expected.
Because picograms add up to nanograms, and nanograms add up to micrograms and before long it's like Flint MI if your're not careful.
Mostly the rest of the time it's basically unmeasurable until something like that rears its ugly head.
Now when water has been subjected to a highly effective distillation or demineralization process which theoretically removes all minerals by orders of magnitude, and it turns out true in practice for those minerals which are measurable, you can have some confidence that the process will also affect some toxic minerals that might be present in unmeasurable amounts, and reduce them to even further levels of unmeasurability.
There's equations for all of this.
When the concentration of any barely soluble compound actually equals zero it's difficult to quantify the increase in solvent strength compared to nonzero, but I can live with it.
> It has been adequately demonstrated that consuming water of low mineral content has a negative effect on homeostasis mechanisms, compromising the mineral and water metabolism in the body. An increase in urine output (i.e., increased diuresis) is associated with an increase in excretion of major intra- and extracellularions from the body fluids, their negative balance, and changes in body water levels and functional activity of some body water management-dependent hormones.Experiments in animals, primarily rats, for up to one-year periods have repeatedly shown that the intake of distilled water or water with TDS ≤ 75 mg/L leads to: 1.) increased water intake, diuresis, extracellular fluid volume, and serum concentrations of sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl) ions and their increased elimination from the body, resulting in an overall negative balance.., and 2.) lower volumes of red cells and some other hematocrit changes (3)
I skimmed the paper, not its citations, so maybe some details are already explained in those sources.
But, I'm not sure of several things.
First, are these effects solely because the lack of minerals? If you drink water with a non-empty stomach, would that still be a problem? Or is it that pure water has some "magical" property that I hadn't thought of?
Second, anecdotally, I find distilled water to taste better. I've drunk tap water, boiled water, and distilled water side by side, and I prefer distilled.
Third, the longer term changes, can they be remedied if you take supplements or mineral-rich diet?
Why would it leech minerals from your body? Your kidneys are more than capable to create an osmotic gradient.
And you presumably consume food with mineral. I mean, drinking water doesn’t typically contain potassium but you don’t see people having potassium leeched out of their body.
I just read the whole conclusion section and they don’t have such recommendations there. Pasted below.
—————————
V. CONCLUSIONS
Drinking water should contain minimum levels of certain essential minerals (and other components such as carbonates). Unfortunately, over the two past decades, little research attention has been given to the beneficial or protective effects of drinking water substances. The main focus has been on the toxicological properties of contaminants. Nevertheless, some studies have attempted to define the minimum content of essential elements or TDS in drinking water, and some countries have included requirements or guidelines for selected substances in their drinking water regulations. The issue is relevant not only where drinking water is obtained by desalination (if not adequately re-mineralised) but also where home treatment or central water treatment reduces the content of important minerals and low-mineral bottled water is consumed.
Drinking water manufactured by desalination is stabilized with some minerals, but this is usually not the case for water demineralised as a result of household treatment. Even when stabilized, the final composition of some waters may not be adequate in terms of providing health benefits. Although desalinated waters are supplemented mainly with calcium (lime) or other carbonates, they may be deficient in magnesium and other microelements such as fluorides and potassium. Furthermore, the quantity of calcium that is supplemented is based on technical considerations (i.e., reducing the aggressiveness) rather than on health concerns. Possibly none of the commonly used ways of re-mineralization could be considered optimum, since the water does not contain all of its beneficial components. Current methods of stabilization are primarily intended to decrease the corrosive effects of demineralised water.
Demineralised water that has not been remineralized, or low-mineral content water – in the light of the absence or substantial lack of essential minerals in it – is not considered ideal drinking water, and therefore, its regular consumption may not be providing adequate levels of some beneficial nutrients. This chapter provides a rationale for this conclusion. The evidence in terms of experimental effects and findings in human volunteers related to highly demineralised water is mostly found in older studies, some of which may not meet current methodological criteria. However, these findings and conclusions should not be dismissed. Some of these studies were unique, and the intervention studies, although undirected, would hardly be scientifically, financially, or ethically feasible to the same extent today. The methods, however, are not so questionable as to necessarily invalidate their results. The older animal and clinical studies on health risks from drinking demineralised or low-mineral water yielded consistent results both with each other, and recent research has tended to be supportive.
Sufficient evidence is now available to confirm the health consequences from drinking water deficient in calcium or magnesium. Many studies show that higher water magnesium is related to decreased risks for CVD and especially for sudden death from CVD. This relationship has been independently described in epidemiological studies with different study designs, performed in different areas, different populations, and at different times. The consistent epidemiological observations are supported by the data from autopsy, clinical, and animal studies. Biological plausibility for a protective effect of magnesium is substantial, but the specificity is less evident due to the multifactorial aetiology of CVD. In addition to an increased risk of sudden death, it has been suggested that intake of water low in magnesium may be associated with a higher risk of motor neuronal disease, pregnancy disorders (so-called preeclampsia), sudden death in infants, and some types of cancer. Recent studies suggest that the intake of soft water, i.e. water low in calcium, is associated with a higher risk of fracture in children, certain neurodegenerative
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diseases, pre-term birth and low weight at birth and some types of cancer. Furthermore, the possible role of water calcium in the development of CVD cannot be excluded.
International and national authorities responsible for drinking water quality should consider guidelines for desalination water treatment, specifying the minimum content of the relevant elements such as calcium and magnesium and TDS. If additional research is required to establish guidelines, authorities should promote targeted research in this field to elaborate the health benefits. If guidelines are established for substances that should be in deminerialised water, authorities should ensure that the guidelines also apply to uses of certain home treatment devices and bottled waters
Vitamins are a totally different area, this is just about minerals, so basically salts of different types. Sodium, Potassium, Calcium and Magnesium salts are the most relevant ones as far as I know.
Any time you drink water that contains lower concentrations of these than your body, you will lose some, as the concentrations equalize. Same thing, just more pronounced. If you drink very large amounts of water in a short time, that can be a serious health hazard, it can lead to hyponatraemia [1]. Distilled water works exactly the same here, but it is more hypotonic, so the required amount to get into problematic areas is probably lower.
Short version: Don't drink huge amounts of water (think upwards of 5l) in a short amount of time without replenishing electrolytes, it could kill you. Applies to both "normal" and distilled water, but probably to a slightly lower amount of distilled water.
Truly pure water becomes quite acidic quickly, I don’t think your water is as pure as you believe.
(For the chemistry here, pure water will absorb CO2, making H2CO3, then splitting into two H+ and a CO3(2-) ions. Since this process release H+ ions, truly pure water becomes acidic on exposure to air.
>truly pure water becomes acidic on exposure to air.
Correct, the carbonate is about impossible to avoid by distillation alone, you need to follow it with point-of-dispensing deionization to get a good blank. Though sometimes the older tradition of freshly boiling distilled stock might still be OK to get rid of CO2.
I just don't like stock any more, micro-organisms can change pH more than air and be more insidious.
But contact with the ever increasing concentration of CO2 in the air is not going to soon rival the amount of CO2 simply pressured into solution for mineral-free seltzer water. Way more carbonate ion in soluton as well as dissolved CO2 gas. Great to drink straight and not nearly as acidic as orange juice. Can nicely moderate the acidity of orange juice to end up with a refreshing lower-calorie orange soda too.
pH is very important but the huge difference is in buffer value where the titratable acidity of the carbonic acid in DI water is insignificant compared to the seltzer.
IOW when you take a sip of pure distilled water with no more carbonate than you get from the atmosphere and no other ions either, the pH of that sip takes on almost the exact pH your mouth had beforehand.
OTOH when you take a sip of seltzer which is simply pure carbonated water, that sip can make very prominent changes to the pH of your mouth (depending on how different your mouth was at the time).
I prefer to do both, repeatedly.
But not club soda which as the name implies has sodium like seltzer does not.
You can get even more carbonate buffer reserve into the water when you dissolve concentrated minerals like sodium bicarbonate and get true soda water instead of just dissolving CO2 gas under pressure, but for me there's too much sodium coming from too many directions already so I want my carbonation to come without sodium and not be a true "soda".
Ah the rewards for non interventionist ultra liberal(reckless, almost) laissez faire and "self regulation". There is no free lunch, the contaminate-for-profit entities and their enablers know full well. Someone else will pay the price, for example the health care system. I see many people blame the "government" here but that is the easy way out. There are local, federal governments and so forth. The first blame should go to the polluters who made sure to this day that there is no effective regulation worth its salt.
Anyone have a robust filtering system? From reading the thread some people recommended a reverse osmosis system. But then that is demineralized which the WHO says leaches minerals from the body.
So one ought to remineralize, and do so in correct proportions, for both calcium and magnesium but also trace minerals. And certain things sometimes recommended to reminerslize (pink himilayan salt) can contain lead.
Is there some simple all on one system in north america that solves this?
I use a reverse osmosis system with an added remineralization filter at the final stage. The unit I have is a counter top model from Apec and can be easily set up to use with your kitchen sink. I swear by it and as added bonus to clean drinking water from the tap you no longer have to purchase plastic bottles of water. The only maintenance is filter replacement, which is relatively straight forward. I tend to replace them every 6 months, though apparently they're good for up to a year. You can find more info on it here... https://www.freedrinkingwater.com/ro-counter-detail.htm
Your body has several devices to filter out non-digestible matter of different sizes. Once filtered - they get stuck, mechanically, for lack of a better term.
Just because you think you can handle dangerous chemicals properly doesn't mean you actually can.
And even if you actually can it doesn't mean you actually should.
Probably shouldn't handle any more than you actually have to to get by.
There are so many other chemicals to choose from.
Perfluorinated hydrocarbons are really just fluorocarbons since they have no hydrogen. But the solvent and gaseous behavior can be similar to hydrocarbons while being non-flammable instead.
Fluorocarbons are very stable compounds and after you have inhaled an anesthetic amount of volatile fluorocarbon compound under clinical conditions, it is expected that the material will wear off by evaporating back out of your system completely unmetabolized and leaving no fluorine behind. I accept that and it's probably not even harmful compared to ether or cyclopropane.
If the carbon skeleton of the molecule is not completely saturated with fluorine but instead has an organic acid group in one of the positions, then it's no longer a plain fluorocarbon since now there's a bit of oxygens in the molecule and their associated hydrogen so you call it a perfluorinated organic acid.
These correspond to the same hydrocarbon skeleton having the same acid group, which are just called plain ordinary organic acids. Many of which are biochemicals such as acetic acid which is the active ingredient in common vinegar.
Except the presence of fluorine can make the corresponding acid much stronger and not behave so much like its nonfluorinated counterpart.
Sometimes the more fluorine the worse until you reach full perfluorination.
You just can't always wash this stuff off. Don't ask me how I know.
Such perfluorinated acids can theoretically react with things that are not even considered alkalis, it would be possible to take a permanent place in a metabolic pathway which millions of years of evolution have arrived at based on organic acids which bond and unbond at a characteristic pH and no permanent members are expected to remain at all times.
The fluorine can become a permanent part of you.
That wouldn't be the best way to strive for millions more years of continuity.
There were so many other chemicals to choose from.
But it's a little too late now.
What's the digital equivalent?
Is there some toxic product or byproduct that has permeated further & deeper than it was actually safe to do, and now it looks like it could be impossible to recover to the pre-toxic condition?
Is it just a matter of unbridled greed, unlimited scale, or are these things that should never be touched at all?
A large number of studies have examined possible relationships between levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood and harmful health effects in people. However, not all of these studies involved the same groups of people, the same type of exposure, or the same PFAS. These different studies therefore reported a variety of health outcomes. Research involving humans suggests that high levels of certain PFAS may lead to the following:
- Increased cholesterol levels
- Decreased vaccine response in children
- Changes in liver enzymes
- Small decreases in infant birth weights
- Increased risk of high blood pressure or pre-eclampsia in pregnant women
The entire water treatment process at the facility I worked at:
Start with pH control to be slightly acidic (in the summertime, when all the algae is having fun copulating and making the raw water extremely basic, this means dumping lots and lots of sulfuric acid). Add in a nice charged coagulant, PACL in this case (and a nice uncharged polymer could be helpful for greasy bits). Mix vigorously, then less vigorously, and then let sit for a while to let the mud settle out of the water.
After settling, bubble 7% ozone through the water. Then send the water through a prepared filter containing sand, gravel, and charcoal with a healthy biofilm on it (I don't remember the exact order, sorry). Be sure to clean the filters every day. Now dump in a load of hydroxide to make the pH slightly basic (also is less hell on your pipes, especially if there's any lead pipes in the system). Add fluoride for health, and dump in all the chlorine (nowadays as bleach; a chlorine gas pipe leak is no fun for anybody). Add some ammonium to get chloramines to help disinfect the water for longer, and some phosphate for pipe corrosion control.
That's basically the same process that's going to get used for any large (think >100 million gallons/day, enough to supply ~300k suburban households), although ozone treatment is relatively rare. UV and reverse osmosis tend to be too expensive to really scale to the large treatment plants, and slow sand filters (not to be confused with the rapid sand filters that are used in most places) requires craptons of space to push enough water to handle a large municipality.
This reminds me of a NYT article I read years ago that measured the amount of Lithium found in water levels around the USA, and they found that areas with higher Lithium levels had lower levels of violent crime.
It also makes you think how vulnerable a majority of the world is to people messing with their drinking water.
> An analysis done by Harvard found it to lower IQs in children:
Looking at that statistic, the levels of the high group are generally ranging from 2-4 mg/L. The target level of water fluoridation is usually about 0.7-1 mg/L, which is about the level of the reference groups in that statistic.
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison, and this is already extremely well-known for fluorine, and accounted for in the water treatment process and regulations.
The maximum allowed in the US is 4mg/L and the CDC recommends giving children up to 8 years old water with at least 2mg/L [1]. There are plenty of places with more than 2mg/L in the US and Kentucky has places over 4mg/L [2].
I bet everyone down-voting my comment is doing it out of reflex and has never read anything about this.
Wikipedia isn’t correct here. PHS now recommends an optimal fluoride concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L). In this guidance, the optimal concentration of fluoride in drinking water is the concentration that provides the best balance of protection from dental caries while limiting the risk of dental fluorosis. The earlier PHS recommendation for fluoride concentrations was based on outdoor air temperature of geographic areas and ranged from 0.7–1.2 mg/L. This updated guidance is intended to apply to community water systems that currently fluoridate, or that will initiate fluoridation, and is based on considerations that include:
Which goes on to say: For many years, nearly all of these fluoridated systems used fluoride concentrations ranging from 0.8 to 1.2 mg/L; fewer than 1% of these systems used a fluoride concentration at 0.7 mg/L (Unpublished data, Water Fluoridation Reporting System, CDC, 2010). When water systems that add fluoride implement the new PHS recommendation (0.7 mg/L), the fluoride concentration in these systems will be reduced by 0.1–0.5 mg/L, and fluoride intake from water will decline among most people served by these systems.
> the CDC recommends giving children up to 8 years old water with at least 2mg/L [1].
Actually, the Wikipedia article says the opposite (the citation it gives is a dead link, of course)--it suggests to parents that they should be careful with having children use fluoride toothpaste or water with > 2mg/L of water.
> There are plenty of places with more than 2mg/L in the US and Kentucky has places over 4mg/L [2].
If you read that study carefully as well, that's talking about the natural fluoride concentration of well water, not fluoridation within water treatment plants. (Another reason to generally prefer municipal treatment plants as a source for water: they are more likely to follow more stringent guidelines for water contaminants than individual wells).
when you account for cooking with fluoridated water, washing food with it, showing in it, and using it in toothpaste/mouthwash, in addition to drinking it, the numbers may add up quickly.
> As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison, and this is already extremely well-known for fluorine
Of course this ignores the fact that it is impossible to adjust the dosage for everyone since everyone has a different level of consumption of the water source that we have "spiked". We are essentially medicating people without telling them and it is quite arbitrary. Not to even mention, we are exposing people who boil their water before they drink to higher concentrations etc.
Science isn't settled on this. There is no consensus. What we are doing is blatantly wrong.
How did we collectively decide with such absolute certainty that the positive impact of adding it to prevent tooth decay outweighs the risks and damages? We didn't.
Also it's not like there is no alternative. Use toothpaste with Hydroxyapatite. It works.
Do you have kids? Toothpaste and fluoride rinses aren’t a substitute for fluoridation - just ask poor (overwhelmingly Black and brown) North and East Portlanders
Perfect is clearly the enemy of the good — no wait this was basically a bunch of people who didn’t want to be disturbed or inconvenienced in the least and thought they knew better
Not a reason to spike anyone's water source. Aren't poor families more likely to make stews/soups that they'll store in the fridge for many days and bring to a boil every day so that the whole family can consume? Won't they top this off with more of the water you (collectively) spiked? And bring it to a boil again, increasing the fluoride concentration.
Why not distribute this incredible miracle/poison in tablet form for free to these poor families you think this is aiming to protect or provide free dental care if you think dental care is of utmost importance?
We clearly think kidneys (dialysis) are special because a past president had a relative that suffered from a kidney condition.
None of this is being done out of good intentions. Most involved are either misinformed because they are taught science is settled and it is safe and great, or simply uninformed.
Keep it coming - I used to work in a water treatment plant so I love water chemistry questions. If you think reboiling it in Teflon a bunch of times isn’t a great idea I agree but I’ll note all those people who go out in the wilderness with nonstick pots and a bunch of Dasani water seem to do fine.
> Water fluoridation started because it was a cheap and easy way to get rid of industrial chemicals
That's fascinating, because this is an article trying to figure out what to do with such chemicals. If treating water with fluoride is a cheap way to help, I suppose we should continue.
I live near a closed naval airbase that used to spray tons of firefighting foam containing PFAS (the bad stuff) before they realized it was hazardous. Since we get our water from a well, I had a system installed with 2 large carbon tanks (~4 feet tall each), a UV light filter (more-so for non-PFAS bacteria concerns), and a sediment filter. Then to catch anything that might slip past, I have a reverse osmosis tank filter linked up under the kitchen sink (for drinking water).
It costs about $1200 a year to have the tanks swapped out, but don't have a monthly water bill since it's a well. Public water companies claim to do the same type of filtering, but who knows what they're actually doing. It's a good feeling knowing for sure my water is clean.
The carbon tank setup needs to be linked up where the water first comes into the property, so I wouldn't pay to have it installed unless you own the house. A setup like this isn't really feasible for an apartment. For an apartment or if you rent a house, you could call a local water filtration company and have a reverse osmosis filter tank installed under your sink. I think they also offer smaller carbon filters that sit under the sink. You could also just buy a small water cooler dispenser (for drinking water) and have 5 gallon tanks delivered as needed.
I think you're wrong. I did extensive research on this prior to purchasing a home recently and the general consensus I found is that you need a pretty advanced water filtration system consisting of carbon + reverse osmosis filtration that requires yearly servicing. Some water companies do this, but most probably don't. You can also have a system installed in your house.
Your standard Brita filter doesn't even come close to filtering these chemicals.
This is not true. The NSF/ANSI standard 53 specifies that filters must remove PFOS/PFAS[1], and both reverse-osmosis (RO) units /and/ granulated activated carbon filters are certified under that standard. Granulated activated carbon filters are the same kind found in Brita filters.
For example, Samsung RWP70010TWW is a refrigerator filter approved[2] for filtering PCBs, PFOS, and PFAS, as well as a whole host of other things. You don't need to spend ten thousand dollars installing a reverse osmosis system to get clean water.
AFAIK, distillation will not remove volatile organics that have a lower boiling point than water(well, theoretically you could do some fractional distillation technique, but its easier to just run a carbon filter).
Deionized water is often acidic as protons are introduced to replace the other ions. Co2 also dissolves immediately from the air forming carbonic acid. Regardless I don't think it's bad for your teeth it's not concentrated or buffered.
Reverse osmosis is the next goldmine opportunity. Every home will likely need one, or maybe there will be neighbourhood nodes. It's even good for getting clean drinking water from salt water.
In India, we got water from groundwater, which was over polluted with minerals, so we bought an RO filter. It's basically a must there, and all the other houses I visited there had one. If we don't fix water pollution here, we will have a similar situation on our hands.
Reverse osmosis is wasteful. The next goldmine is atmospheric water generation. The atmosphere is the largest untapped reservoir of clean water on Earth, and mother nature has already desalinated the water through evaporation. Far less energy intensive and wasteful to condense the atmosphere than clean water by R.O.
If you want clean water, you need to do more than evaporate it. Thanks to nasty stuff like Atrazine and PFAS, our rainwater brings chemicals that can alter reproductive organs, endocrine function, and are linked to cancer. I don't know if reverse osmosis removes these chemicals, but it would be worth removing at the source. An ounce of prevention can save a pound of downstream medical and societal costs.
I’d like to see numbers too, but the gas is a higher energy state and so its not outlandish to imagine there might be a way to bring it down efficiently.
Atmospheric water collection will have contamination problems with volatiles and aerosols. Unusable in polluted cities. Unless you filter and clean, but you're back to the initial problem...
Are you referring to the resources used to create the equipment then discard it when it's done? Or to the wasted water? A permeate pump increases efficiency quite a bit.
Greed doesn't require capitalism to make it so everyone loses.
Most especially the greediest of them all lose the most compared to what they could have had instead.
With so much pride in getting ahead of the pack, much more sigificant gains always lie in a different sometimes opposite direction that can not be visualized at all by such a mind.
Not OP but, Capitalism deems profit above everything else. Maybe profit shouldn't come before our own safety. Almost all safety regulations are paid for in blood sometimes its because we just didn't know. Most of the time its because companies refuse to implement it unless they have to by law.
We are sacrificing our own health for what? Money?
No one is saying we shouldn't have jobs don't be dense. Maybe we shouldn't value money over literally everything else.
Capitalism doesn't 'deem' anything. Let's remain literal. It's a word denoting the concept of freedom for individuals to extract and use value from their activities to secure an economic base for themselves. Groups of the rest of us can then form independent judgements on those activities and regulate them by law. In this way, all-powerful sanctions are available for governments and regulators to haul in those activities which pollute our world. Separation of function is key to this process and is absent in communist societies hence the appalling pollution created by the USSR in its heyday. Sadly, governments and their regulators do, in the main, a woeful job in performing their regulatory duties.
Why can't I have a conversation about Capitalism without people putting out how much worse the USSR is/was? I'm not saying your wrong but we can talk about the failings of our country without whataboutism to "defend it".
Capitalism is too broad a concept to boil it down to a short description. My argument is about what Capitalism lead to the greed and moral failings of our country. Capitalism is so en-grained in the American way of life its hard to separate the two. Our style of government lead to more and more greedy people doing more and more underhanded things to make a profit and thus in turn maintaining that profit. America is pointed out as the shining example of how successful Capitalism is as a form of government and its not.
You point to the failings of the USSR to protect its environment and ignore our own. Yes we have an EPA which is a good step, but our form of government enabled private citizens and corporations to essentially purchase the ability to pollute. To put chemicals in our food and water that was cheap, but necessarily safe. Our country is failing just as poorly at protecting its citizens health and environment as the USSR. We just have the ability to point to the EPA and say we are trying harder so that's good enough. Its not,
The EPA has refused to add a single chemical to its watch list for public water since the clean water act of 1972. Our water standards are based on science that is almost 50 years old. If you think its because in those 50 years we haven't learned anymore about health, then i have a bridge to sell you. Its because updating those standards would cost money and not have any direct monetary benefit in return, because we live in a country/exist in a form of government that prioritizes profit over the health of its own citizens.
You need to do more then just link an article about a Communist country doing something shitty. I never advocated for a particular style of government. So linking some horrible thing the USSR did doesn't further the conversation in anyway. And if your only response to Capitalism is bad is to show worse form of government then you really don't have an argument to defend Capitalism.
Capitalism can thrive and everybody can win in a more sustainable progressive way than we have now with simply a respectable return on investments, and as an extreme example foregoing all other available profits.
When free enterprise is available it might be a way to adjust your stance across this spectrum, but free enterprise, capitalism, and greed are three common things that have no real requirement to appear together although individuals or corporations are often seen who do nothing but combine all three and push it beyond any reasonable limit.
We live in the woods where only well water is available. We have a water softener using NaCL (removes Ca and Mg), an ozone machine to remove Sulfur, Iron, and Manganese, then we have a sediment filter into a UV light to disinfect, since there are some bacteria in the well. Finally, we run it through a carbon filter, then to our fridge and faucets.
Impossible except with dialysis and osmosis membranes or by usong adsorbptipn and exchange (so not based on size), size of a water molecule is roughly 0.0003 micron some pollutants are just 5-10 times that... Of course things are a bit more complicated by the shape of the molecules.
> The scientists estimated that more than 200 million people—the majority of Americans—have tap water contaminated with a mixture of PFOA and PFOS at concentrations of one part per trillion (ppt) or higher. Andrews and Naidenko say previous research shows that levels higher than one ppt can increase the risk of conditions such as testicular cancer, delayed mammary gland development, liver tumors, high cholesterol and effects on children’s immune response to vaccinations. “It’s a calculation of what would be a safe exposure level,” Andrews says. Even when the researchers shifted their analysis to a higher level of 10 ppt, they still found some 18 million to 80 million Americans to be exposed. Representatives of the chemical industry have disagreed with such concerns. “We believe there is no scientific basis for maximum contaminant levels lower than 70 ppt,” the American Chemistry Council said in statement to Scientific American.
anyone have more context on gauging the safe levels? What are the studies that show 1ppt increases the risk for cancer?
the EPA also currently sets the level at 70 ppt:
> To provide Americans, including the most sensitive populations, with a margin of protection from a lifetime of exposure to PFOA and PFOS from drinking water, EPA has established the health advisory levels at 70 parts per trillion.
I expect better phrasing than “Forever Chemicals” from Scientific American. Using ‘chemical’ as a scare word is unbefitting of actual science. I mean water is a “forever chemical “ by their definition.
I’m not saying there are not harmful chemicals in drinking water, I'm not saying this article isn't raising good points. I just think using “chemical” the way it’s used by fear mongers who don’t understand or care that literally everything is a chemical isn’t helpful.
Here is a post from Scientific American on the very topic
What an unhelpful comment. The phrasing is defined in the article
>These compounds may take hundreds, or even thousands, of years to break down in the environment. They can also persist in the human body, potentially causing health problems.
It is clear that this means "Teflon" and similar molecules that aren't processed biologically. "Forever chemicals" here is excellent phrasing. They in fact last an indefinite amount of time in the ecosystem, and they are "chemicals" in that they are not naturally occurring.
For you to insist this is fearmongering is disingenuous and you should feel ashamed. This isn't at all the same as calling water "dihydrogen monoxide" and hyping up fear of "chemicals". There is in fact an active industry that promotes the production of these compounds for reasons of profit, and the externalities thereof are not at all taken into account by the mainstream understanding.
Except this is how laypeople perceive chemicals when they react to them as a (possible) threat. They conflate "chemical" with a compound beyond natural complexity. Humans excel at creating compounds that naturally do not naturally occur in abundance for thermodynamic reasons. Chlorofluorocarbons come to mind immediately.
So how is it scaremongering? It is both accurate (PFOAs, etc are indeed chemicals) and of the proper connotation in the common parlance (using "chemical" to mean something manmade rather than naturally occurring).
Your argument holds no water.
By the way, an article in Scientific American isn't scientific literature. It's a magazine intended at lay audiences. You might be confusing it with something like Nature journal.
If someone is patently wrong about something in an unhelpful way, feeding into it is counterproductive.
Using chemical to mean something man made is factually incorrect. It's in our best interest to educate against its misuse rather than acknowledge/encourage it, particularly in this case because the line between the two things is hazy at best.
I think your reaction is a bit too strong, which perhaps makes you miss a subtler point better. This use of the word "chemical" seems to be a thought-terminating cliché of sorts and I would argue it is precisely what leads to overreaction in cases such as dihydrogen monoxide.
People learn to associate "chemical" with "bad" and a certain class of "chemical-sounding" names with "chemical". It would be better if the lay knowledge and perception of chemicals was more nuanced, so that it is realized that chemicals are not bad due to their membership in this category, but for other, more complex reasons.
There are bad chemicals and there are good chemicals, and there is no shortcut to knowing which is which other than putting effort into understanding the mechanisms.
I think penalising this usage of the word "chemical" might further this goal.
You have to take the entire phrase “forever chemicals” together. It’s a subset of chemicals that don’t break down / take a long time to break down and can’t be processed by the human body. At that point, it becomes a well defined phrase no matter what your opinion on the word chemical by itself means or implies.
It's not a fear mongering term. It properly describes the risk. Fear mongering would be "water death chemicals", but considering how serious of an issue this is I'm not even sure that should be considered fear mongering.
I believe so. I don't see how a plant would be able to push these molecules out with the xylem alone. It would require a sort of filtration that separates hydrogen from oxygen and reforms them at the target site, and then deny all other molecules, which I don't believe is something we've seen in plant life.
Maybe? But how would you know, if the acceptable upper limit is defined in parts per trillion. You'd need lab grade instruments to even detect if the Brita filter is working to spec, which considering how cheap it is, is probably not something done in QC. I'd probably rely on ZeroWater for something like this but even then I would have doubts and assume my water has some unacceptable level of PFAS.
The same way we know about lots of products, by the company and/or third parties testing them? The same way we "know" how much of a drug is in a pill bought from a pharmacy, or the % of a chemical in a bottle of cleaning stuff, or....
Obviously there can be cases of companies being misleading or completely fraudulent. But generally speaking you aren't testing every cosmetic, food, clothing etc. to be sure that they're made the way they claim, why would water filters be different? Legislate certification for them if needed, rather than worry about how hard it is for a single person to test at home.
Despite Biden traditionally being a corporatocratic right-of-center Dem, it is possible that this progressive wave in opposition to Trump is so powerful that Biden will placate it in order to save face. We might witness "meme magic" in the making, in other words.
I don't rely on Biden to decide, of his own volition, on the right solution to anything, but the anti-Trump energy is so strong right now that perhaps he will be far more progressive than we would soberly expect. Let us hope for the best.
They might just dislike H2O2. But it is useful as a disinfectant, and it can help get rid of earwax if you dilute it. Do we really need to ban the stuff? Peoples' tastes vary, but personally, I'm not a huge fan of earwax.
Per multiple doctors and an audiologist the best way to clean your ears easily is to just use warm water while showering and direct it down your ear canal with moderate water pressure. I used an irrigator for years, just with tap water, but the possibility of too much pressure always worried me. I struggle(d) with ear wax build-up in my teens but have been wax free for 2 decades now, so long as I am diligent about cleaning my ears.
You can not trust the EPA and still drink tap water. Test it yourself if you want (I actually agree that their lead levels are way too generous).
In Seattle it's basically raw snowmelt with 0 metals (had mine tested for heavy metals, register 0). Lots of places in the US have perfect water even if you don't trust the EPA's warning thresholds.
But that does not happen unless the municipal water source changes day-to-day, or is catastrophically badly run in a really inconsistent manner... which is almost never the case in the US. Even in Flint, it's not like the water changed day-to-day; it just became consistently acidic, which pulled lead from pipes.
Aquifer-pumped water is consistent, reservoir-fed water is consistent, groundwater is consistent.
Anecdotal but in my area (NJ) we're notified numerous times a year not to drink the water. The kicker is that many times we recieve the mail after the time where we supposedly shouldn't be drinking it. Also messed up that we're still charged for that water, but that's another topic.
Usually the notices are for lead. Other times they don't specify and just say don't use it so I can only assume it's something worse if they don't want to mention why.
"Toxins" is such a broad category you can say just about anything about it. I have trouble taking any health advisory seriously when they only talk about nonspecific "toxins" instead of naming the compounds.
This is a situation where the word "toxins" is fine, and they're being broad on purpose because it's just a claim of existence.
> I have trouble taking any health advisory seriously
Please keep in mind you're not talking to the person that made a health advisory. You're talking to someone who is saying why it's possible for water to be unsafe to shower in.
An aside, but it's interesting how quickly people can adapt to the taste of water in a different city or country. Every time I visit a new area or country, I'm immediately unpleasantly surprised by the taste of the water, but within a few days I forget that there ever was a difference and wouldn't even notice what was different if I tried to be conscious of it. I always see people traveling to another country complain that the "water doesn't taste good" there, implying that it is of lower quality or unsafe, and it usually just makes me chuckle because people traveling in the opposite direction will say the same thing.
Of course, this article is about water that is potentially hazardous which is a real problem.
United Kingdom? As far as I know there's been no problems with our drinking water in terms of contaminations. They add fluoride which I think had a positive impact on the health of the nation (citation needed).
While a spontaneous and completely sane reaction to this is to save oneself by privately installing filters, buying organic etc. these are problems that ultimately and obviously require collective solutions, i.e. by government and through treaties between governments.
But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that any government action is likely to be met with equal and opposite reaction (in the west), a reaction that seems to stem in large part and primarily from a section of society that lives by the adage "Après moi, le déluge", and secondarily from the section of the populace that has been spoon-fed conspiracy theories (by the former?) about the government and its nefarious nature.
I suspect there are readers here that might disagree with the above, and it's not my intention to start a flame war. Instead I'd be interested to hear if there are any rational reasons why the government should not be given adequate means to regulate and follow up that regulation with the required inspections to make sure toxins are not released into the general environment that forms the basis of our, as well as other biological, present and future, life.