I don’t know a thing about you, but I’ll bet that you are probably searching for information about the quality of tap water, and for ideas on how to improve the healthfulness of the water you drink, bathe in, cook with, and use to wash your clothes and your dishes. Maybe I can help you.

It’s been clear for years now that part of the “green” movement, the movement to improve and save the quality of our earth’s environment, is the move toward “natural health.” There have been backlashes against the use of pesticides in growing the produce we eat.

“Organic” food has become more and more popular, even though it is more expensive than food grown with toxic chemicals. Local farmers’ markets are enjoying a boom. And finally, we are starting to become aware that the most important step we can take to improve our health is simply this: make sure that the water we drink is pure.

Even though we live in a time of growing health consciousness, the sad truth is that the purity of our drinking water is declining. Tap water can become contaminated in several ways. Just a few of these are:

• agricultural runoff of water containing pesticides, etc., into our water supply
• improper use and disposal of common household chemicals
• corporate pollution
• disposal of unused or unwanted prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines by flushing them down the toilet or putting them down the drain.

Chlorine, a known deadly poison, is deliberately added in small amounts to municipal water systems to kill bacteria that would otherwise infect the water. Lead, another known deadly poison, leaches into our water from the linings of aged water pipes running under our streets and carrying water into our homes.

In fact, recent studies conducted by the Ralph Nader Research Institute concluded that “U.S. drinking water contains more than 2,100 toxic chemicals that can cause cancer.” Even if they didn’t cause cancer, wouldn’t it be of some concern to find out that 2,100 toxic (poisonous) chemicals are in our water?

What else do you suppose they might be causing? And what about the exponential increase in danger when chemicals are combined? In a 1995 Science Advisory Report to the EPA, it was stated that “when two or more of these contaminants combine in our water, the potency may be increased as much as 1,000 times!”

Maybe you’ve read or heard some of this before. Maybe you decided a while back to switch to drinking bottled water, in an effort to protect yourself and your family from this toxic overload coming out of your kitchen faucet. Surely bottled water, in those conveniently-sized plastic bottles that you can carry with you and drink in your car or in the office, must be safer than tap water; after all, the label says it comes from “natural springs.” That sounds pretty healthy!

Guess again. As long as bottled water is sold within the same state where it was produced and bottled, there are NO government regulations regarding its content or purity! At least there are regulations, for example, on city tap water that require it to be filtered and disinfected, and that prohibit it from containing any E-coli bacteria or water pathogens that cause intestinal problems.

There is no requirement that bottled water has to be any safer or purer than tap water; and in some cases, it may be even less pure. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stated outright: “Companies that market bottled water as being safer than tap water are defrauding the American public.”

And there’s another problem, of course, with the business of bottling water in those handy plastic bottles. If you’re at all conscious of the environment, you’ve probably heard that millions and millions of plastic bottles are manufactured, sold, transported, and then dumped in landfills. Since plastic is not biodegradable, it’s anyone’s guess how many hundreds or thousands of years those bottles will lie there. Eric Olsen, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has said, “It’s killing our planet, and for no good reason.”

So is there some solution that will enable you to protect your health, as well as the planet’s health? Yes! The answer is the use of a home water filtration system.

While any water filtration system is better than none at all, there are important differences between products. And “best” does not necessarily mean “most expensive.”

Here are a few points for your consideration:

• Two popular technologies for filtering drinking water are “reverse osmosis” and “demineralization.” Although both these methods do remove many contaminants from your drinking water, they also remove minerals that are critical to your health. Completely mineral-free water doesn’t appear anywhere on earth in the natural state: therefore we can conclude that our bodies were not meant to drink it.

  We require modest amounts of calcium, potassium, magnesium, and other minerals, to be taken in through food and water. The World Health Organization conducted a study over several years that concluded: “Drinking water should contain minimum levels of certain essential minerals.” These two types of filtering process are not optimal for our use.

• Many filtration systems do not use multifiltration. This means that only a few toxins are filtered out of the water, and others remain. You’ll still be drinking them, and suffering their ill effects.

• It’s not just the water you drink that is at issue; it’s also the water you cook with, and the water you shower or bathe in. In a hot shower or a warm bath, the pores of your skin open with the warmth, allowing water to penetrate to deeper skin levels. If you bathe in purified water, then your skin will be well-hydrated without being affected by dangerous chemicals. This is even more important if you have especially dry skin, or any skin disorder.

Taking all this into account, it is my opinion – and that of thousands and thousands of other educated consumers – that there is one water filtration system that beats all the others hands down. There are several companies in the marketplace producing many well-known brands, and quite a few of them are good and decent products. However, only one such product has been voted the Number One-rated home water filter in America, five years in a row: Consumer Digest magazine’s “Best Buy” from 2003 through 2007 was Aquasana.

Aquasana offers a variety of products for all kinds of budgets:

Aquasana is flexible, cost-effective and very efficient for you and your family’s health. Consider how much you and your family will benefit from having water that you can be sure is safe and clean. Visit Aquasana’s site (click here), and see why I believe Aquasana is the best dollar-for-dollar buy – and, in fact, the best overall product, regardless of price.