Over the past few years, companies across the United States have begun a “clean” drinking water movement by selling a variety of bottled waters. These include: Non-chlorinated, fluoride-free, and mineral electrolyte alkaline drinking water. One company, Zero Mass Water takes another approach, allowing people to collect water from around their own homes, directly from the atmosphere.
The water movement
But the most recent buzz comes courtesy of Live Water, a company that retrieves water directly from a “natural” spring, bottles it in beautiful 2.5lb glass jugs, and sells it for about $40.
The key difference between Live Water and most other drinking water alternative companies is that Live Water’s product remains “natural”, untreated, “harmonic”, unpolluted, and mineral-rich.
Skeptical? Watch their pitch below:
It’s important to think critically about this latest fad. Listen to the words, for example, “..water from springs is filtered by the earth itself… water as its founded nature is a liquid crystalline matrix of H2O molecules that suspends a variety of beneficial microbes and beneficial algaes…”
Which doesn’t make scientific sense: Water in liquid form is not crystalline in structure. This should be your first red flag that this company is using false, un-scientific information to scare the general public into thinking that their tap water, and water from other sources, is unsafe, and, ultimately, that they should be purchasing Live Water (at $40 a bottle) instead.
Your health may be at risk
And there’s also a reason why your water is filtered: The sources you collect your water from, including natural springs, can and often do have many different strains or colonies of bacteria, viruses, and even parasites. Chlorination kills most of the bacteria and viruses, and filtration physically eliminates some parasites and other pathogens that are not otherwise affected by chlorine. And yes, there have been instances of unsafe drinking water within our communities (no one is forgetting about Flint, Michigan), but overall, our municipal water systems are very safe and effective.
Note: In a cruel sense of contextual irony, one of the major reasons for the Flint water crisis was a lack of funding for the proper filtration systems like those we just mentioned.
The truth is, water pulled from a stream versus water from a tap is identical on a molecular level. The cleanliness of the water, however, largely depends on the things you cannot see, and whether or not it was contaminated from elements like arsenic, radon, and pesticides (many of which are found in “natural” water sources). Let us not forget the epidemic of cholera in the late 19th-century, which caused thousands of deaths: It was water treatment and filtration that helped save millions of lives, as cholera came from the “raw” water systems that were all they had available at that time.
Consuming something like Live Water is regression, not progression.
It is, of course, up to you what you choose to put in your body. But tread carefully if you choose to drink ‘raw’ water, and beware of the diarrhea and bloody stool that can come as a result of drinking unfiltered, un-chlorinated water.
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