Clean drinking water is essential for a healthy life

By Victor D’Souza, Moodubelle
Bellevision Media Network

13 June 2010: Water is an incredibly important aspect of our daily life. Every day we drink water, cook with water, bath in water, and participate in many other activities involving water. Water is absolutely essential to the human body’s survival. A normal person may live for about a month without food, but only about a week without water. Water is ranked as second only to oxygen as essential for life.

The human body is 70% water, the brain is 85% water, blood is 90% water, the human liver one of our most vital organs is 96% water. It is a logical assumption that the quality of the water we drink will have a very significant effect on our overall health. Increasing the quantity and quality of the water we drink is probably one of the most important health enhancement steps we can make.

The human body is a water machine‚ designed primarily to run on water and minerals. Every life giving and healing process that happens inside our body happens with water. Lately, it has become one of the most fitness crazes as people all over the world who seek to gain the health benefits of drinking adequate amounts of water.

Although people used to rely largely upon well water or tap water to fulfill their daily quota of drinking water, in the last two decades, consumers have begun to shy away from this water source. Bottled water companies, promising a purer, healthier water product than tap water, have expanded greatly in order to supply growing demands for quality drinking water.

Millions are spent each week on advertising campaigns to give consumers the perception that bottled water comes from some pristine mountain spring or magical underground aquifer, assuring purity and quality. However, the fact is that bottled water may be little better than just tap water in a bottle or sometimes may be worse, we cannot be sure.

The use of bottled water, many experts say, goes beyond health and safety. While regular tap water may be not very clean, one cannot recommend using bottled water as an alternative. Because all bottled water is not necessarily safer or healthier than the water that flows from municipal water systems. While most water bottles are made of safe polyethylene, many still carry the water in just normal plastic bottles.

While a large portion of the world desperately seeks clean drinking water the developing countries spend billions on bottled water when perfectly clean water is readily available. Not only we spend more money on water with lower standards than those of well or tap water, we are also filling our landfills with tons of oil based plastics that take thousands of years to degrade.

We are not sure whether the bottled water is spring water or just the tap water or further treated unless we know how the actual process takes place in the bottling company. While purified well water or tap water is arguably safer and purer, water filters may provide the better and healthier solution to the problems. Drinking filtered water is also a much more economical practice than drinking bottled water. Probably the well or tap water boiled and filtered would be safer.

It is always best to store water in glass containers, not plastic. Water is the universal solvent; it will dissolve some part of everything it contacts. When water is stored in plastic containers, it takes on some of the chemicals that the plastic is made from. Water stored in glass containers tastes better, looks better and is better for us. If our water looks and tastes better, we will naturally drink more, resulting in a multitude of health benefits.