It shouldn't be surprising that Americans might understand that their water might not actually be safe despite the municipal government saying it is. It took two whole years for administrators in Flint, Michigan to acknowledge their lead pipe crisis. Trust needs to be earned and maintained, and America is notoriously bad at maintaining critical public infrastructure.
How does that compare with food safety in commercial products? That's the question.
I have a whole-house soft-water filter for general use, and for drinking/cooking get 5-gallon bottles filled with RO purified water from The Water Spring on Homestead in Santa Clara. The municipal source for RO water matters, and Santa Clara has the best utilities in the valley.
Stay safe out there.
I know the Eldorado Springs from when I'm in Aspen, Austin, Altadena, and while I don't get the hype surrounding the stuff, it's more than acceptable (for water).
Taste matters. Be it for coffee, tea, cooking, making desserts, even baking, or making your own pizza dough.
[1] https://www.lenntech.com/processes/disinfection/regulation-e...
Compared to that, in New York, I can definitely taste it and it took some getting used to. (Ironically, at this point my senses seem to have been rewired to associate the taste of chlorine with fresh, i.e. non-stale tap water.)
Uferfiltrat=shitty, deep well=depends, dammed reservoirs=mostly good/usually soft water.
Can even vary within larger cities, where different parts get water from different sources.
I use filtered tap water (under-sink type) which removes most of it.
A lot of the higher end coffee makers like Keurig have built-in filter cartridges in the water tank.
Most commercial coffee maker setups I've seen (hard-plumbed) in offices have a filter attached to the plumbing behind the appliance.
Water can be safe/potable and taste terrible, and vice versa.
Chlorine in water is actually fine and tasteless at the concentrations it reaches at the taps - it's basically extremely diluted stomach acid.
The problem is chloramines caused by chlorinated organics. These give water the swimming pool smell and are bad for you.
The solution is easy - reduce the organics in the water before chlorination, and oxygenate (aerate) the water before delivery. But systems can get overwhelmed by too much rain and runoff.
If it’s done, the level is often imperceptible, contrary to the US (I actually had to look this up – I’ve never tasted it in German drinking water in various cities myself).
No. The chlorine in tap water is HOCl + OCl- (it’s a weak acid/base equilibrium). Stomach acid is HCl. And chlorine has both a noticeable smell and odor even at low concentrations (e.g. 1ppm in water). The smell is much worse if any of the chlorine has reacted with organic crud to turn into NCl3.
More enlightened cities in the US use monochloramine (NH2Cl), which is a rather weak disinfectant but is barely noticeable at normal concentrations.
Visiting friends recently, they have well water which smells like sulfur from their tap. Visiting them for a few days, I do not get inured to it, but my friend cannot tell it's there.
Note this excessiveness is really needed for espresso though; a regular Brita jug handles more tolerant methods of brewing perfectly well (and to be honest most people murder coffee enough that the water is the least of their concerns)
Lets you fiddle and fine tune things more for your own preferences too.
There is a whole book on the topic (2015, with a new edition supposedly coming soon):
Is it worse than the other groceries we can't readily get without them being wrapped in plastic? Or storing leftovers in plastic bags at home?
if you only drink ro water it can creep up on you, but takes some time
refs:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/co...
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/php/data-research/fast-facts-w...
Rather if they did there'd be probably quite a lot of concern.
Not sure where that old wive's tale came from but even my parents had similar concerns against filtered water ages ago.
His other publications include a self-published amazon book titled Autism, Enzymes and the Brimstone Demons. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Enzymes-Brimstone-Demons-Trill...
Drinking sulfate won't repair broken sulfur metabolism, but it's completely plausible that a subset of people maintained adequate day-to-day function with the benefit of sulfate-laden water, and now fall below the threshold with sulfate mostly removed.
I'm on a well, but with super hard water. So I have a water cooler, which I empty into a Brita pitcher, but just for drinking.
Just for the flavour.
I cook with my hard water though. Lots of stews and soups too, make bread, etc. So I suspect I get sufficiently mineralised as a result.
For context, I was boiling a large pot of water and got distracted by a call. Most of the water boiled away, well over a gallon. I was left with a solid white disk of calcium at the bottom. Also, when I broke it to get it out, it was super sharp, almost cut myself.
> While some studies have hypothesized that the use of RO water could contribute to vitamin B12 deficiency, no significant differences were observed in this study.[20] Symptoms of deficiency were not significantly associated with serum vitamin deficiency status. Only VDD was significantly associated with fatigue as a symptom. This discrepancy raises questions about the current normative values for vitamin B12 and vitamin D3 in the Indian population and suggests the need for further research.
A whole lot of people drink RO water. If it were a simple correlation, I would expect to see cases and papers from all across the world.
I also know there's a long history of false claims along the lines "distilled water sucks the minerals from your body", also called "hungry water". I first heard in the 1980s as a supposed reason for not using distilled water in a radiator. Or even commentary of it in the Carnivorous Plant FAQ at https://www.sarracenia.com/faq/faq3385.html .
Because of that long history, and the lack of a good mechanism for how it should work, I need a much higher level of evidence for a direct, causal connection.
To wit: Arsenic is not an essential micronutrient.
"Trace quantities of arsenic have been proposed to be an essential dietary element in rats, hamsters, goats, and chickens. Research has not been conducted to determine whether small amounts of arsenic may play a role in human metabolism." [1]
It has the same toxicity and micronutrient profile as selenium, another extremely toxic but nonetheless essential micronutrient. Unfortunately, activists with an unrelated agenda have been spreading unscientific misinformation about arsenic to advance that agenda.
Same story as fluoride outrage actually. Being anti-science is fashionable and most people are ignorant about chemistry.
It is one thing that makes me glad I am no longer a practicing chemist.
The authority that I have appealed to (Wikipedia) is a reasonable one and bias should not be implied in the absence of these supposed corrections you have to make.
I’m open-minded …
Enjoy your 10000% recommended daily intake of Arsenic.
Plant-based arsenic often has poor bioavailability. Quite a few plants people eat are natural accumulators but it just passes through. Pesticides and geology are the primary bioavailable sources.
Here's the maintenance manual for the one I have. The sterilization and emptying/refilling are done as part of the filter replacement, and not otherwise:
https://www.whirlpoolwatersolutions.com/wp-content/manuals/W...
I wouldnt run bleach through the filters. The filter medium saturates, and any further use will just recontaminate water
People who grew up in one of these areas are habituated into never drinking the tap water even if they move to a city with excellent tasting and very high quality tap water. I’ve lived in extreme examples of both.
You also see the opposite case, where someone who grew up with amazing tap water naively grabs a glass from the tap in north San Diego and has a “wtf is this” moment.
Fortunately, I live in the Pacific Northwest currently, which generally has some of the best tasting water you’ll find anywhere. No one would dream of not drinking the tap water.
Like me.
Luckily, I am very unreasonably distrusting of government and never drank the stuff.
If the federal rules allow unsafe levels of PFAs it’s reasonable to expect that municipal water companies adhere to said unsafe limits. So no we probably should not trust our municipal water supplies.
Maybe in countries that have functional governments that’s a safe bet.
Under-sink RO systems seem pretty great to me, anywhere you live. With a small holding tank, municipal water pressure is enough to drive small RO cartridges, requiring no electrical power to run, and giving more than sufficient flow rate for all drinking water. I think the biggest downside is a few hundred dollars in initial setup, and cartridges every year or two. This seems safer than relying on the changing opinions of experts as to what amount of harmful chemicals are safe to drink.