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Tag : water
Link Between Soft Drink & Incidence of Depression
A new study links soft drinks and depression. Researchers followed almost 264,000 people for 10 years. The study demonstrated rather convincingly that people who drink more than four soft drinks per day have a 30% increase in their risk of becoming clinically depressed.
Interestingly, it’s not the sugar, since those who drank diet soda had a slightly higher risk of depression than those who drank the sugared versions. The sugar, of course, will make you fat, raise your cholesterol, and increase your risk of dementia. But there’s something else that’s present in both the diet and sugared versions that seems to increase your risk of developing a
Is There Something in the Water?
Most of us take for granted that the water flowing from our tap is clean and pure. We compare our tap water with the standards of much of the world and we reassure ourselves that the water in our drinking glass is safe. But we should be asking an important question: “safe” and “pure” compared to what?
The practice of purifying our drinking water with chlorine was pioneered by the military a century ago. It began to be commonplace in the U.S. in the 1930’s and was widespread by World War II. Chlorination has been a major boon to human health: the spread of water-borne diseases that still claims millions of lives around the world soon became a thing of the past in the developed world. That, as they say, is the good news.
But remember Dr. Mixon's first rule: “Anything strong enough to help is strong enough to hurt!” That applies to chlorination of water in a surprising way. Chlorination very effectively kills bacteria, parasites, and viruses.
Your Water: Distillation Trumps Filtration Anyday
In the past in talking about water fallacies, I’ve gone over alkalinity, ionization, and generally discussed why there really isn’t much you can do to improve your water besides cleaning it.
I prefer distillation because it cleans to the highest standard, which is practical with our current state of science and engineering. This is not to imply that filters don’t work; they do. A filter will remove some or most of the chlorine, most of the dirt, and most of the nasty critters that may be coming out of your tap. On the other hand, a good distiller will remove essentially all of it. A good illustration of the limitation of filters verses distillers is to try putting saltwater through a filter.
Alkaline Angst
Alkalinity is the next piece of pseudo-scientific silliness that frequently comes up when people talk about water.
What is the proper PH of your water? I’ve seen a ton of folks telling people how important it is that their water be alkaline. The reasoning here is that the PH of your body is generally alkaline (which is true and also a fancy way of saying your blood is salty), thus your water should match the PH of your body. Sadly, that oversimplifies the situation somewhat.
Before we tackle this one we need to establish exactly what is meant by “alkaline” and what exactly is “PH”. Most folks will tell you that PH is a measure of how acidic something is. They then conclude that since alkaline is the opposite of acidic, alkaline is good and acidic is bad. This view however has a few inaccuracies. First off, PH doesn’t measure acidity; rather, it measures how far it is from distilled water. The PH scale goes up to 14 with distilled water smack in
Liquid Nincompoopery
It never ceases to amaze me how angry people get when you take a shot at their favorite placebo. When I talked about water ionizers in my last blog, I clearly didn’t make many friends. Look folks, don’t shoot the messenger. I didn’t write the science; I just read it and passed it on. I’m very sorry if you bought one of these water ionizers. They don’t work, they don’t help, and the basic premise behind them is nonsense. You should indeed feel angry if you purchased one, not at me, but at the science-challenged nincompoop who sold it to you.
Believe me, I sympathize. The science here gets murky and it’s easy for perfectly intelligent people to be taken in by this sort of thing. Especially when any online search for water ionizers turns up so very many sites shouting how effective it is and brimming with “testimonials” from happy customers. That’s why I’m going to dedicate this blog to examining some of these claims under the light of some basic