Pure Water: What You Need to Know

It’s not easy making sense of all the different water filters out there. Add the daily headlines about new toxins discovered in our water, most recently pharmaceutical residues, and many people throw up their hands at the thought of ever being truly confident about the quality of the water they are drinking. No wonder people are willing to spend $3 a pint for specialty waters with claims of super-purity and ultra-hydration!

Actually, creating truly pure, hydrating water is pretty straightforward if you understand three things. The first is the difference between filters and purifiers (and why both are actually necessary). The second is the recent advent of a new type of corrosive toxin which changes the whole landscape of water purification. The third has to do with understanding what makes water healthy, hydrating, and biocompatible.

1. Filters vs Purifiers

Everything about water starts to get clear when you understand the difference between a filter and a purifier.

A filter is a substance like carbon or charcoal which removes certain types of chemicals and toxins from water. Filters are valuable, but by themselves they are generally inadequate in today’s world for turning municipal water into healthy drinking water. No filter or combination of filters has ever been designed which can come even close to dealing with the toxins present in our water today. The reason this is true is simply due to the sheer number of toxins in our water. It is impossible to anticipate all of the toxins with multiple filters, much less the toxins we don’t even know about yet.

A purifier is defined as a component that removes 90-95% of all contaminants in water. There are only three purifier technologies known: reverse-osmosis, deionization, and distillation. Because of their sheer power, purifiers must form the foundation of any drinking water system to have a chance at creating truly pure water.

Each type of purifier has one or two toxins it doesn’t deal with very well, but this is overcome by synergy with complementary filters. One reason that most purifying systems on the market such as reverse osmosis do not create truly pure water is that while they usually utilize filters in a complementary way, they rarely use multiple purifiers to move above the 90-95% purification rate and stay there over time. Reverse osmosis systems for example start at 90-95% purification when new but decline over time to well below that. Thus when you change your membrane after a year you could be drinking water that is only 80% pure or less. With the number of toxins in our water today, that figure is unacceptable. Our 14-Stage Biocompatible Drinking Water System which we have featured for the last thirteen years is rare in that it combines filters and purifiers in the optimal way to create water that is 99.999% pure when the system is new, and never falls below 99.8% pure over time.

Once again, to make sense of the water purification confusion, remember that filters are good at removing a small spectrum of toxins but are not designed to do the heavy lifting that purifiers do. Only the right combination of filters and purifiers can create truly pure drinking water.

2. Chloramines: The New Super-Toxin

The new toxin we are referring to is not MTBE, the gasoline additive that is leaking into groundwater around the country, though that is nasty carcinogenic stuff. It is not the free radicals chlorine or fluoride, though they are also toxic. The latest addition to our water supply are chloramines. Created by combining chlorine and ammonia, this powerful compound is being added to more and more municipal water supplies every month in the name of “public health.” Chloramines change the entire landscape of water filtration and purification because they are so very corrosive, and create a very disturbing unintended consequence.

As dangerous as they are, why do chloramines make choosing a water purification system simpler? To understand this you need to grasp why chloramines are used by municipalities in the first place. Basically, after 9/11, municipalities began adding a lot more chlorine to their water to guard against bioterrorism. The main problems with chlorine were: complaints about high chlorine levels and irritated skin, hair, and lungs; bacteria forming “bioshields” in pipes, thus resisting chlorine’s destructive powers; and the fact that adding chlorine to water produces carcinogenic trihalomethanes (THMs). Solution? Combining chlorine and ammonia results in a compound called chloramines, allows the use of much less chlorine and thus THMs, while creating a more potent guard against bacteria and bioterrorism. What could be the problem with this? Keep reading.

Chloramines are much more potent than chlorine alone. How much more potent? This is what concerns us so much. Chloramines are so potent that they will actually slowly dissolve the metals from your pipes! So in addition to themselves being dangerous to drink, they will raise the metals level of your drinking water. The enormous implications of that statement may not be immediately clear, so let us spell them out.

Many Americans have copper pipes in their homes. Older homes may still have galvanized steel pipes. Newer homes may use PVC or other plastics. All plumbing installed before 1986 may have joints soldered with lead-based solder. Therefore, vast numbers of Americans now are at risk for exposure to higher levels of metals, including lead, as well as plastics due to the corrosive action of chloramines in their pipes. What kinds of problems can this cause?

In the course of our research we came across three big warning signs around chloramines. The biggest came this from a paper presented to a Canadian conference on municipal water. It showed that mice and rats given chloramine-treated water that had flowed through copper pipes all developed Alzheimer’s disease symptoms! Upon autopsy it was revealed that these animals had very high levels of copper in their brains. Some of the mice and rats were then given purified water and something equally remarkable happened – the mice recovered from their symptoms! Second, there was the case of an environmental scientist who was determined to understand why children in Washington DC were being tested with high lead levels in their bodies. Investigation showed that the chloramines in DC water were leaching out the lead from pre-1986 solder and old lead pipes, which was then consumed by the children. Finally, we are hearing reports of homeowners finding pinhole leaks in their copper pipes, apparently caused by a combination of thin copper and heavy chloramines. The implication of this is that the rest of us may be due for the same pipe problems eventually.

Here’s the bottom line: if your water has chloramines added to it, and most either do now or will soon, nearly all water filters you may be inclined to use will be obsolete. This includes standard carbon filters, ceramic filters, and even basic reverse osmosis and distillation purifiers. This certainly includes so-called “ionizers” which never did much to purify water in the first place. None of these systems are designed to both take out serious toxins such as chloramines and fluoride and metals like copper and lead, and create 99%+ purification, over time. It’s really that simple.

Our research suggests there are just two options that can address not only these contaminants, but all other contaminants that might show up in our water in the future as well. One is our 14-Stage Biocompatible Drinking Water System which specifically targets your drinking water. With its three purifiers and seven total physical purification components, it is absolutely unmatched in purification power, offering 99.999% purification power when new, and at least 99.8% over time.

The second system we can recommend is a whole-house filter with special media that removes both chlorine and chloramines from all the water in your house. Read more about our Whole House Chloramine Filter System . We began carrying such a filter in 2005 and has been very well-received. This filter makes great water for bathing, garden, landscape, as a pre-filter for your drinking water system, and for protecting your plumbing from corrosive chloramines. Remember, the whole house system is not designed to create drinking-caliber water; only a triple purifier can do that effectively in today’s world. We are just being honest about this - anyone who claims that a whole house water system is capable of creating drinking-quality water in US cities (and more and more companies are making this claim) is either uninformed or just deceiving you.

3. Creating Truly Healthy, Hydrating Water

The third thing that is important to understand about creating balanced, hydrating, truly healthy water is that ironically the more pure water becomes, the more it is in need of restructuring, as well as mineral and pH balance. This is why you may hear that reverse osmosis has a bad reputation among some filter producers—because untreated, it produces water that is acidic and demineralized (aggressive). This however is not a reason to abandon reverse osmosis—just a good reason to restructure, alkalize, and remineralize the purified water.

We now know that all water carries an energetic memory of everything it has been in contact with. The 150+ year old science of homeopathy as well as more recent discoveries validate this fact. Therefore, to create truly biocompatible water, we offer an exclusive restructuring system in our 14-Stage Biocompatible Drinking Water System that erases the old energetic memory of your water, then restructures it with the frequencies of 74 minerals using the far-infrared spectrum, mimicking the revitalizing action of water flowing over rocks in a stream. Far-infrared is gaining attention today as a very healing part of the energy spectrum for our body, and has been used for millennia in the Far East. These stages have no moving parts and never need maintenance or replacement.

Finally, the water flows through stage 14, which is what we call the “Alkalizer.” At this point, the water, measuring a TDS (total dissolved solids) of 0 ppm (meaning perfect purity) and a pH of around 5.5, flows through a cartridge containing the highest grade of coral, which raises the pH to over 8 typically, and raises the TDS to around 15 ppm. This balances the water so your body can hydrate and nourish itself in optimal ways, and eliminates the "aggressiveness" from the water that you find in normal reverse osmosis and distilled water. It is this aggressiveness that over time can lead to depletion of our body, so this is just one of many reasons we especially don't recommend distilled water, as that is very aggressive water.

We include a TDS meter with the system so you can monitor its performance yourself. Your TDS meter will allow you to know in advance when to change your filters as well, so you can get the most life out of them.

We are proud to offer a system this powerful in not only purifying water, but creating water that is ideal for supporting optimal health!

14 Stages of Purification Perfection:

Stage 1 - Five Micron Pre-Filter
Stage 2 - Internal Coconut Shell Carbon Filter
Stage 3 - Reverse Osmosis Membrane (Purifier #1)
Stage 4 - Mixed Bed De-Ionization Purifier (Purifier #2)
Stage 5 - Mixed Bed De-Ionization Purifier (Purifier #3)
Stage 6 - Holding Tank
Stage 7 - Stainless Steel Ultraviolet Light
Stages 8 & 9 - Homeopathic Restructuring - Erasing Memory, Molecule Coherence
Stages 10 - Far-Infrared Reprogramming - Adding Natural Mineral Properties
Stages 11 - Far-Infrared Reprogramming - Adding Natural Earth Properties
Stages 12 - Far-Infrared Reprogramming - Natural Flow Form, Surface Tension Lowered
Stage 13 - Coconut Shell Carbon Post-Filtration
Stage 14 - Alka-Min (Alkalizing, Ionic Remineralization)

(See PDF Product Sheet,  14 Stages, for more detailed explanation of the various stages. For more information, see a diagram of the system.