Drinking Water

We all know water is important. It makes up approximately 70% of our physiology and is critical in many areas, including digestion. However, all the water you see today is not created equal.

A lot of it has been taken from a decent source, but then has been bastardized to the point that the side effects are more dangerous than the benefits. So what water do you trust? Check out these 6 sources, and see how your current water intake is affecting your body.

Tap Water

By now you would have to be living under a rock to not have heard that most tap water is riddled with contaminants and bares little to no semblance to its original counterpart. Some of the biggest culprits for ruining your tap water include fluoride, chlorine, and VOC’s (volatile organic compounds). Read more

The importance of high quality drinking water is vastly understated. Compromising approximately 75 percent of the body, water is found both inside and outside the cells and is the basis of all body fluids including blood, lymph, saliva, digestive juices, urine, and perspiration.

Therefore, an unadulterated source of pure drinking water and learning how to optimize hydration is one of the most fundamentally important things one can do for their health. Read more

Americans can take a warning from a University of Florida study of bottled water in China ─ don’t drink the liquid if you’ve left it somewhere warm for a long time.

Plastic water bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate. When heated, the material releases the chemicals antimony and bisphenol A, commonly called BPA.

While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said BPA is not a major concern at low levels found in beverage containers, it continues to study the chemical’s impacts. Some health officials, including those at the Mayo Clinic, say the chemical can cause negative effects on children’s health. Read more

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that uses existing technology to allow researchers and natural resource managers to collect significantly more information on water quality to better inform policy decisions.

Researchers developed a new technique for collecting more (and more accurate) water quality data. The technique was tested in this brackish marsh.

“Right now, incomplete or infrequent water quality data can give people an inaccurate picture of what’s happening — and making decisions based on inaccurate data can be risky,” says Dr. François Birgand, an assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. “Our approach will help people get more detailed data more often, giving them the whole story and allowing them to make informed decisions.” Read more

Our ancient ancestors’ ability to move around and find new sources of groundwater during extremely dry periods in Africa millions of years ago may have been key to their survival and the evolution of the human species, a new study shows.

Insert shows with arrow the location of study area in eastern Africa. Map of the Northern Tanzanian Divergence Zone depicts the East African Rift System (EARS), containing Lake Natron (north), diverging around the Ngorongoro Volcanic Highland massif and splitting into two separate rift valleys (Lake Eyasi on west) and Lake Manyara (on east). Prevailing wind is from the east. Olduvai basin lies to the west of and in the rain shadow of Ngorongoro.

The research — published in the journal PLOS ONE — combines geological evidence from the Olduvai sedimentary basin in Northern Tanzania, which formed about 2.2 million years ago, and results from a hydrological model.

It shows that while water in rivers and lakes would have disappeared as the climate changed due to variations in Earth’s orbit, freshwater springs fed by groundwater could have stayed active for up to 1000 years without rainfall. Read more