Drink H20 Only When Your Thursty For It

Water willies, part one

Battling the bottlers

If you’ve been a reader of mine for any length of time at all, you already know how I feel about consuming more water than is absolutely necessary. If you haven’t been part of my flock, my take on the matter is simple:

Drink H20 only when you’re thirsty for it.

But not just any H20 will do – you’ll want to avoid most tap water at ALL costs. The vast majority of it has added fluoride in it. Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown that this mineral does not prevent cavities. But it does cause all sorts of other nasty problems for your skeleton and musculature.

For this reason, you can probably remember me writing in the past about how, if you must drink water, to guzzle only bottled water (unless you have a clean well for a water supply). This is because it was the lesser of available evils at the time – most bottled water didn’t contain added fluoride, and most people won’t shell out for an expensive filter that eliminates fluoride, even though it’s lifesaving money well spent

But nowadays, this long-time recommendation of mine is rapidly becoming hazardous. Why? Because more and more bottled waters today ALSO have unsafe levels (any more than the barest molecular trace is unsafe, in my opinion) of fluoride!

There are 2 reasons for this: One, because most of it is nothing more than fortified tap water (around 40% of bottled water begins life as ordinary tap water). And two, because a lot of H20 bottlers are ADDING fluoride to their water nowadays! That’s one reason why bottled water sales have skyrocketed in just the last few years – people have been brainwashed by the dental industry into believing fluoride’s good for them

To make matters worse, recently the brain-damaged American Dental Association issued a recommendation that urges people to check the labels of their bottled water to make sure they CONTAIN fluoride! They seem to actually think that it’s a lack of fluoride in the water that’s causing the modern epidemic of cavities, rather than all the sugar in the modern diet. How backward is this?

As if that’s not bad enough, the water industry has even begun marketing fluoride-rich bottled water specifically to kids – the one group most harmed by fluoride in the skeleton and musculature!

And here’s the icing on the cake: All this gulping isn’t just a fad – Americans of all ages are drinking more bottled water than ever. Keep reading
http://www1.youreletters.com/t/350810/2908015/786410/0/

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According to a recent Yahoo! article:

Consumers dumped over $100 billion a year on bottled water in 2004
Bottled water consumption has grown to 41 billion gallons worldwide in 2004, from less than 26 billion in 1999-and increase of nearly 60%
In the U.S., the average gallon of bottled water costs $10-more than 4 times as much as a gallon of gasoline.

Just to give you a little context on these factoids, humans consumed enough bottled water last year to COMPLETELY DRAIN Lake Erie – at a cost that’s roughly equal to the Gross Domestic Products of manufacturing giant Singapore and oil-rich Kazakhstan.

That’s a lotta agua, huh?

So how do we get people around the world to stop swilling ten times more of the stuff than they need every day? Good question. But I’ve got an idea of how to do it. I’ve also got a few droplets of relatively good news to share about the water debate (well, it’s actually deadly news – but it’s good for getting people to stop drinking extra H20)

I’ll let you in on both in the next Daily Dose.

Mindfully thinking instead of mindlessly drinking,

William Campbell Douglass II, MD