In our last Winter issue of Get Fresh! Magazine, and here on our
blog, we published an article 'How Healthy is Your H2O?' by Carolin
Pickering. Reader Susie Kearley wrote to us in response to this
article and we have asked Carolin Pickering to respond.
Letter from Susie Kearley
I read with interest the Winter edition of Get Fresh!, and was surprised to see in the article on water safety by Carolin Pickering that: “once lead is in our bodies it cannot be removed.” That is simply not true. Whilst it is obviously desirable to avoid any kind of metal or chemical poisoning in the first place, it is not a life sentence if you do get unlucky. Infrared sauna therapy, alongside a whole food diet, slowly eliminates all number of metal and chemical toxins, including lead. So if anyone out there does have lead poisoning, don't despair – there is a solution.
Furthermore, the 'common contaminants' box showed chlorine, nitrates and nitrites in the water, but the article was not about removing these contaminants – which would require some filtration – but about the pipework leading to your tap. If there isn't any chlorine in your water when it comes out the tap, then you definitely need to be worried!
Ph is not a contaminant, but a level of acid/alkaline balance. Nitrates and nitrites, used in agriculture, are present in all tap water, and are limited by government legislation. Not even reverse osmosis gets it all out, but RO and distillation are considered to be the best filtration systems available. The cheapest way of finding out whether these contaminants are in your water is to look on your water board's website! A test kit can tell you more, but don't be alarmed by chlorine, nitrates, and minerals - they are in all tap water!
Response from Carolin Pickering from Simplex Health
The aim of the article was to educate the reader about drinking water quality and that it is important to be informed and take control of it. Contaminants can include a wide range of substances or organisms in water. They are not necessarily harmful but may become a contaminant at higher levels. Therefore, the water test kits contain a range of test strips to give the user a wide overview over the quality of their water, whether that is a less harmful contaminant like pH or chlorine or a more harmful one. Yes, it is correct, that lead can be removed from the body, although it is a very slow process. Removing the source of the poisoning and chelation therapy are the most common treatments. Lead can be potentially harmful especially in growing children and pregnant women, and until the 20th century it wasn’t discovered how dangerous even a small amount of lead can be to humans. Our recommendation is that prevention is better than cure.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) set the standards for drinking water in the UK. These include maximum concentration levels, which are for nitrate 50mg/l, nitrite 0.50mg/l and the pH should be between 6.5 and 9.5. Very high amounts of nitrate can cause the potentially fatal blue baby syndrome in very young children. A high level of pH can be an indicator for other contaminants present, in addition acidic water can be corrosive to metals, especially the lead in lead piping. The DWI also recognizes that chlorine is used as a disinfectant and generally harmless. It plays an important role in water quality. They do, however, advice to keep the levels of chlorine to a minimum. Chlorine can become a concern in drinking water because some people can be very sensitive to its taste and smell, some may even experience a felling of being unwell or headache.
For more information about the Concentration or Value maximum of the different parameters, please visit
http://dwi.defra.gov.uk/consumers/advice-leaflets/ and click on Drinking water standards/regulations. The watersafe water testing kits will give the user a reading of the level or sensitivity of each parameter so they can be compared to the
guidelines set by the DWI/DEFRA.
Read the original article here
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