FROM AN ARTICLE BY DR MICHAEL COLGAN

Every creature in creation is mostly water.  Three-quarters of your brain is water. Your muscles are 70 percent water. Your blood is 82 percent water. Even your bones are a quarter water.  Almost all your biochemistry can take place only in water.

Pure Well Water - Where?

Many people still have private well water. They commonly think this spring-fed water is cleaner than tap water, because it does not go through any treatment system. It is not treated with chemicals such as aluminum and chlorine. But infectious and parasitic diseases are still the principal cause of death and illness throughout the world, primarily because of poor water quality. In 1997, diarrhea was ranked first in the world as a cause of illness and sixth as a cause of death. [1, 2] Diarrhea is caused mainly by contaminated water.

Like all commercial supplies, most well water is also contaminated with man-made toxins.  All drinking water, including well or spring water is derived either from surface waters or groundwater. Water from either source is rarely pure. Increasing industrialization and urbanization, which inevitably spawn toxic dump sites, together with intensified agriculture, which contaminates water with fertilizers and pesticides, have decimated the pure water supply.  In addition we have all the microbes of civilization that breed happily in your water supply if it is not treated. To drink well or spring water without having it tested for contaminants on a regular basis, is playing Russian roulette.

To add to your health burden, by-products of chlorine causes illness, including cancer.  During the chlorination of drinking water, a complex mixture of by-products forms from chlorine and the organic and inorganic compounds present in raw water, including the carcinogens trihalomethanes and chloroform. [3] 

Gastrointestinal cancer and urinary tract cancer are strongly linked to chlorination. [4]  Researchers also estimate that 15 percent of bladder cancers in Ontario may be caused by drinking water containing relatively high levels of chlorination by-products.  A report by the Center for Disease Control in Canada, admits that the risk of bladder cancer from drinking water is an important public health problem. [5]  Arsenic is another major water contaminant widespread in the water supply. This is a problem for both untreated water and municipal water.  Arsenic is very difficult to eliminate from water using conventional methods. Arsenic in drinking water is a recognized cause of cancer of the skin, lung and bladder.
[6, 7] 

The Quest For Clean Water

So what are the alternatives? The bottled water industry is booming. But many of these products are simply tap water passed through "conditioning filters" such as charcoal, which eliminate some of the chlorine and unpleasant tastes and odors.  These filters do not remove the toxins.  What about "spring" water? Brands labeled "Spring Water" legally have to be from a spring, unless the words are a brand name, or part of a brand name. Then they are just tap water. Spring water, however, is just untreated groundwater.  Whatever goes into the surrounding ground ends up in the spring water.  Today, spring water is no more pure than well water.

Springs also contain all kinds of organic matter and often some very toxic minerals. A test of the well known bottled Appollinaris spring water imported from West Germany , showed excessive levels of selenium and cobalt, and a level of arsenic that exceeded the EPA standards by 6000 percent. [8] The purity of bottled water is a figment of the greedy imaginations of the folks who profit from it. 

Distill Your Water

The only reliable bottled water is distilled water. Virtually everything is removed by steam distillation, leaving almost pure H20. And because distilled water is often used for medical purposes, the companies that produce it have more rigorous standards.  Bottled distilled water, however, is very costly. An excellent alternative and a potent anti-cancer strategy is to put in your own purification system to clean your tap or well water for drinking and cooking. From the work of many scientists, a lot of new houses are now having whole house distillation systems installed that clean all water entering the house.  Now that's clean!  By far the best system, however, is a home distiller. 

Some folks object to this purity, complaining that the very emptiness of distilled water causes it to leach minerals from the body. There have been many articles making these claims recently. Anyone with a basic understanding of biochemistry knows that it is impossible for water to leach minerals from your body. As soon as you drink it, water becomes a soupy mixture with all the contents of your gut. On absorption through the intestinal wall, the mixture immediately blends with your body fluids and becomes part of you. There is no physiological way it can suck minerals out.

It is the fruits, vegetables and grains that take up the minerals and concentrate them sufficiently to provide our mineral requirements. Dr. Eric Underwood, a world expert on minerals in food, states it plainly, "Plant materials provide the main source of minerals to animals and to most members of the human race."  Drink and cook with water as pure H20, and put another tick on your cancer prevention program. 

Another myth generated by dubious marketers is that distilled water absorbs carbon dioxide making it acidic. The only "bubbly" water I see is usually in a bottle of Perrier or San Pellegrino. I can leave my glass of distilled water sitting by my computer desk and it does not start to "consume" carbon dioxide and change its chemistry. Distilled water is not some kind of magnet that suddenly sucks in carbon dioxide from the air. If it did, all water would. To make Perrier or soda "bubble" the carbon dioxide is forced into it. And as we all know, leave your Perrier sitting open and it is not long before that carbon dioxide has all disappeared leaving you with still water. Distilled water or pure H20 also has a neutral pH. It is not acidic at all, it is non-reactive and this is why it is used in research and in hospitals.

Anyone who doubts any of the above should do their own research. The National Library of Medicine's Medline archive is open to anyone with access to the internet. It is free and you can look up all the VALID scientific studies you wish. You will find none about the supposed toxic effects of distilled water. The site address is http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

This article is an excerpt from Dr. Colgan's forthcoming book You Can Prevent Cancer.
 

REFERENCES:

[1] Ballester F, Sunyer J. Drinking water and gastrointestinal disease: need of better understanding and an improvement in public health surveillance. J Epidemiol Comm Health, 2000; 54:3-5.

[2] World Health Organization. Life in the 21 st century. A vision for all. The World Health Report 1998. Geneva: WHO, 1998.

[3] Koivusalo M, Vartiainen T. Drinking water chlorination by-products and cancer. Rev Environ Health, 1997; 12(2):81-90.

[4] Bull RJ, Birnbaum LS, Cantor KP, et al. Water chlorination: essential process or cancer hazard? Fundam Appl Toxicol, 1995; 28(2):155-166.

[5] Wigle DT. Safe drinking water: a public health challenge. Chronic Disease Can, 1998; 19(3):103-107.

[6] Cantor KP. Invited commentary: arsenic and cancer of the urinary tract. Amer J Epidemiol, 2001;153(5):422-423.

[7] Yu RC, Hsu KH, Chen CJ, Froines JR. Arsenic methylation capacity and skin cancer. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev, 2000; 9(11):1259-1262.

[8] Cantor KP. Weissman JD. Choose to Live. New York: Penquin Books, 1988.

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