We often get served tap water in restaurants and don’t even think what’s in it. We just drink it.
I do hope that you don’t drink tap water at home, unless you filter it. If you do, this article is for you.
When you drink tap water, you are also drinking: painkillers, blood thinners, hormones, birth control pills, antidepressants, chemotherapy agents, even cocaine and amphetamines.
Whatever goes inside us, also comes out of us, through our own biological effluent, every time we flush the toilet. The excreted drugs pass right through most sewage treatment processes and end up in rivers and lakes, and then in our drinking water.
Our drinking water comes from Lake Ontario, the same lake we shouldn’t be swimming in or eating fish from. Doesn’t it make you wonder?
The presence of pharmaceutical drugs in our water is only a small part of all the toxins that our drinking water contains.
All agricultural pesticides are washed down into our rivers, lakes and ground waters, only to end up in our tap water. Recent article in Now Magazine confirms alarming levels of Atrazine in our top water. Herbicide Atrazine has been banned from agricultural use in Europe in 2003 when studies confirmed its harmful
influence on human endocrine system causing disruption of reproduction and development.
In order for our top water to be free of harmful bacteria, it needs to be chlorinated.
According to the U.S. Council of Environmental Quality, a cancer risk to people who drink chlorinated water is 93 percent higher than among those, whose water does not contain chlorine.
Bottled water might not be your solution either as it’s not subjected to the strict guidelines because it
is classified as food and falls under the Food and Drugs Act.
Aside from arsenic, lead and coliform bacteria, the act does not set limits on specific contaminants but says simply that food products cannot contain “poisonous or harmful substances” and must be prepared in sanitary conditions.
Monitoring of water quality in the bottled water industry is “essentially voluntary and internally regulated,”
Outside of Quebec, labels on bottled water that is not spring or mineral water don’t have to specify the source of the water, even if that source is your municipal water supply. There has been numerous incidents when bottled water contained harmful toxins similar to top water.