Author Archives: Drink H2O

6 reasons you need a Evolution Water Ionizer

Under Sink Water Filter

Check out these reasons why you should put an Evolution Premium Ionizer in your home!

  1. Powerful Antioxidant: Evolution Water neutralizes free radicals helping to reduce aging, disease, and deterioration

  2. Alkaline pH: Evolution Water helps neutralize your bodies pH that over years has most likely become acidic from all of the processed foods, sugary drinks,and even bottled water. Maintaining proper alkalinity through neutralization supports better health and vitality.

  3. Evolution Ionizers use our Water Filtration System, ensuring the certified healthiest water free of contaminants.

  4. Evolution Ionizers provide our bodies with energy through infusing lots of oxygen into them.

  5. Ionized water is six times more hydrating than standard water, and can penetrate our cells much easier. More hydration = More energy.

  6. Our Ionizers also produce acid water which is great for cosmetic reasons such as your skin and hair, helps plants grow, and can be used for household cleaning free of chemicals.

What Are The Effects of Low and High pH On Your Water?

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Although things like bacteria and arsenic having a negative effect on your drinking water are known, the pH level of your water also affecting you is less understood.

What Are pH levels in Water?

Potential of Hydrogen or, pH, levels in your homes water refer to the amount of dissolved hydrogen ions the water contains.

The pH of water is measured in a range of 0-14. A pH level of 7 means it is completely neutral, and anything from 7-14 means it is basic , and from 0-7 meaning it acidic. Lemon juice, a common acidic liquid has a pH of 3, while  chlorine bleach, a highly basic liquid sits from 11-13.

The EPA does not regulate pH levels in water, but it does recommend that pH levels remain somewhere between 6.5 and 8.5. Even so, the water in many homes (especially homes with well water) have pH levels that fall outside of that range.

What Problems Do Low or High pH levels pose on your drinking water?

According to the World Health Organization, exposure to pH levels above 11 results in irritation of the eyes, skin and mucous membranes, as well as worsening symptoms of skin disorders.

Exposure to low pH levels can result in some even bigger problems. That’s because acidic water allows the metals in your pipes to leach into your water supply. When these metals get into your water, they can wreak havoc on your plumbing system and lead to potential health problems.

When it comes to your plumbing system, acidic water can prematurely corrode your pipes and stain your sinks and drains. It can also stain your clothes and result in water that smells bad and tastes metallic.

When you consume these metals, neurological and reproductive issues can occur, along with the fact that many of these metals are carcinogenic.

 

We at evolution offer several solutions to these problems. Our Aura H2O can rid your water of the contaminants which affect the pH. Also, our Aura Alkaline Water Filter can regulate your water’s pH to your choice while providing alkalized water.

 

Clean Water Act’s Restrictions Put Your Health In Danger

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Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials

About 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to E.P.A. reports but midlevel E.P.A. officials said that internal studies indicated that as many as 45 percent of major polluters might be either outside regulatory reach or in areas where proving jurisdiction is overwhelmingly difficult

Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, N.M., for instance, recently informed E.P.A. officials that it no longer considered itself subject to the act. It dumps wastewater — containing bacteria and human sewage — into a lake on the base.

More than 200 oil spill cases were delayed as of 2008, according to a memorandum written by an E.P.A. official and collected by Congressional investigators. And even as the number of facilities violating the Clean Water Act has steadily increased each year, E.P.A. judicial actions against major polluters have fallen by almost half since the Supreme Court rulings, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data by The New York Times.

The Clean Water Act does not directly deal with drinking water. Rather, it was meant to regulate the polluters that contaminated the waterways that supplied many towns and cities with tap water.

The two Supreme Court decisions at issue — Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army Corps of Engineers in 2001 and Rapanos v. United States in 2006 — focused on the federal government’s jurisdiction over various wetlands. In both cases, dissenting justices warned that limiting the power of the federal government would weaken its ability to combat water pollution.

In 2007, for instance, after a pipe manufacturer in Alabama, a division of McWane Inc., was convicted and fined millions of dollars for dumping oil, lead, zinc and other chemicals into a large creek, an appellate court overturned that conviction and fine, ruling that the Supreme Court precedent exempted the waterway from the Clean Water Act. The company eventually settled by agreeing to pay a smaller amount and submit to probation.

Via: New York Times

Check out our PRODUCTS on how to combat these issues.

 

Chemicals in Bottled Water: Where Do They Come From And What Are The Effects?

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The more we learn about bottled water, the more it has become clear that is is not a safe alternative to tap water, as many of the companies lead us to believe. One of the biggest issues with bottled water is the amount of chemicals it contains.

How do chemicals get into bottled water?

Chemicals get into bottled water in two different ways. First, certain chemicals (like chlorine and chloramine) are present in the water that gets bottled in the first place. Many bottled waters are simply bottled tap water, so many of the common chemicals that you see in tap water are also present in bottled water.

The second way that chemicals get into bottled water is from the plastic that the bottles are made of. Plastic contains many different types of chemicals – such as BPA – that can leach off of the bottles and get into the water they contain.

How many chemicals are there in bottled water?

According to a recent study, a single bottle of water contains nearly 25,000 different chemicals. Many of these chemicals mimic the effects of pharmaceuticals in our bodies, and they can interfere with our hormone receptors.

For children, women of child-bearing age and pregnant women, the chemicals in bottled water have been shown to increase the risk of:

  • Stunted growth
  • Early puberty
  • Premature birth
  • Infertility
  • Early menopause

For the rest of people, the chemicals in bottled water have been linked to an increase risk of:

  • Diabetes
  • Heart disease

Why is a Evolution Healthworks home filtration system a better alternative to bottled water?

Our Water Filtration System provides you with the certified healthiest water, far superior to bottled water, and you dont have to worry about any of the other possible ways bottled water can contaminate you.

We offer Water Filters that can provide you with the purest and healthiest drinking water.

 

4 Factors Affecting The Taste Of Your Tap Water

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Most people think of water as being a pretty tasteless liquid, however, your tap water can vary greatly state by state, and even in some cases, city by city. Many home owners have chosen to install WATER FILTRATION SYSTEMS to improve both the taste of their water and remove the contaminants.

4 common factors that affect tap water taste

  1. Disinfectant chemicals. One of the most common complaints homeowners have about their tap water is that it tastes like chemicals. The reason for this taste, is that water treatment facilities use chlorine or chloramine (a mixture of chlorine and ammonia) among other chemicals, to disinfect water before it’s sent to our homes and flows through our pipes.
  2. Mineral leaching from pipes. Another common complaint about tap water is that it tastes metallic. This is often due to minerals like iron and copper that leach into our water as it travels through public pipes and/or the pipes in our homes. The severity and type of metallic taste in your water will depend on the age and condition of the pipes it travels through as well as the material that those pipes are made of. The infrastructure of the water piping is in serious needs of updates around the country, and in some cases water is flowing through pipes that pre date World War II.
  3. Algae blooms. Algae blooms in source water like lakes and rivers are typically seasonal. When they occur, homeowners are often taken off-guard by the sudden change in tap water taste. The taste imparted in tap water by algae blooms is often described as earthy or musty. This was seen in May of 2014, as the water in North San Diego county was affected by the algal blooms in Poway.
  4. Source of water. The taste of your tap water can change depending on where the water originally comes from. This taste difference is most recognizable between well water and city water, because well water often contains many more minerals that can affect its taste.

 

California Shuts Down Wastewater Injection Wells Over Water Contamination Fears

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There are many environmental concerns connected to the proliferation of domestic gas and oil drilling. One specific concern is the spread of chemicals used in the drilling process into drinking water aquifers.

California has taken notice and shut down the activities of gas and oil companies aquifers in Central Valley over fears that they may have contaminated aquifers with fracking fluids and other toxic waste from drilling operations. The state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources earlier this month ordered seven energy companies to stop injecting wastewater in certain wells, claiming that the practice “poses danger to life, health, property, and natural resources.”

ProPublica has the full scoop:

The problem is that at least 100 of the state’s aquifers were presumed to be useless for drinking and farming because the water was either of poor quality, or too deep underground to easily access. Years ago, the state exempted them from environmental protection and allowed the oil and gas industry to intentionally pollute them. But not all aquifers are exempted, and the system amounts to a patchwork of protected and unprotected water resources deep underground. Now, according to the cease and desist orders issued by the state, it appears that at least seven injection wells are likely pumping waste into fresh water aquifers protected by the law, and not other aquifers sacrificed by the state long ago.

“The aquifers in question with respect to the orders that have been issued are not exempt,” said Ed Wilson, a spokesperson for the California Department of Conservation in an email.

A 2012 ProPublica investigation of more than 700,000 injection wells across the country found that wells were often poorly regulated and experienced high rates of failure, outcomes that were likely polluting underground water supplies that are supposed to be protected by federal law. That investigation also disclosed a little-known program overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that exempted more than 1,000 other drinking water aquifers from any sort of pollution protection at all, many of them in California.

Those are the aquifers at issue today. The exempted aquifers, according to documents the state filed with the U.S. EPA in 1981 and obtained by ProPublica, were poorly defined and ambiguously outlined. They were often identified by hand-drawn lines on a map, making it difficult to know today exactly which bodies of water were supposed to be protected, and by which aspects of the governing laws. Those exemptions and documents were signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown, who also was governor in 1981.

State officials emphasized to ProPublica that they will now order water testing and monitoring at the injection well sites in question. To date, they said, they have not yet found any of the more regulated aquifers to have been contaminated.

We at Evolution Healthworks understand that there’s a growing problem with water contamination across the country. Check out our solutions to ensure you and your loved ones are getting the healthiest water.

How Does Cooking With Unfiltered Tap Water Affect Your Food?

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Many people don’t realize the amount of tap water they are using in the kitchen for cooking on a daily basis. If we’re concerned with the tap water we’re drinking, shouldn’t we also be concerned about the quality of the water with which we’re cooking?

Cooking with unfiltered tap water can negatively affect your health

Tap water is used in a wide variety of the most common dishes. Whether we’re rinsing vegetables or boiling a pot of pasta, the food we cook almost always comes in contact with our tap water, and in turn all of the pollutants that come with it. This means that although you’re not drinking that tap water out of a glass, you’re still at risk for the same health problems.

Cooking with unfiltered tap water can affect the way your food tastes

In addition to affecting your health, cooking with unfiltered tap water can affect the taste of everything that you make and consume at home. Just consider these common household foods and drinks that use water as a primary ingredient or require water for cooking:

  • Coffee, tea, hot chocolate and other hot beverages
  • Ice cubes
  • Sauces
  • Soups and stocks
  • Pasta (boiled with water)
  • Fruits and vegetables (washed with water)

If your tap water is contaminated with anything that alters its taste, it will also alter the taste of the food that you cook with that water. For example, if your water has high levels of iron, do you really want you coffee dark with a splash of iron?

Install the right filtration system for cooking with tap water

Improving the tap water you use for cooking will require a filtration system that provides more than just pure drinking water. We at Evolution Healthworks recommend our WHOLE HOME SYSTEM that provides clean water out of every faucet and shower head in your home. We also recommend our Aura H2O Water Filter, which provides you with the cleanest water for cooking possible, ensuring benefits for your health.

Drinking Water? You Still Might Be Dehydrated

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Staying hydrated is important, especially during the heat of summer. Even if you drink a lot of water, though, other factors might be working against you.

  • If you’re under a lot of stress, the adrenal glands that pump out stress hormones become exhausted, causing dehydration and low electrolyte levels. While upping fluid intake can help, limiting stressors is the best long-term solution.
  • If you don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, you’re not getting the water they bring along with them. Fill up half your plate at each meal with produce — it could give you an extra cup of water a day.
  • Some prescription medications can cause dehydration as a side effect. Many medications act as diuretics, which increase urine output and a risk of dehydration.
  • Eliminating carbs from your diet can decrease the number on a scale, but it could lead to dehydration, too. Carbs such as oatmeal, whole grain pasta and brown rice soak up water during the cooking process, which can increase hydration levels.
  • Any type of workout can lead to dehydration. If you are sweating out more than you are drinking water, there is a risk of dehydration. Health.com says to weigh yourself before and after exercise and for every pound lost, drink 16 to 20 ounces of water.
  • Taking certain kinds of dietary supplements can send you to the bathroom more often, causing a loss of fluids. To combat dehydration, speak with a nutritionist or doctor about any potential side effects.
  • As you age, it gets harder to stay hydrated and harder to tell whether you’re really thirsty. Keep a bottle of water near you at all times and, each day, keep a running total of how much you’ve consumed.

 

 

Pharmaceuticals In Our Drinking Water: Where Do They Come From and What Are The Effects?

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According to a study released by the Mayo Clinic earlier this year, nearly 70 percent of Americans take some sort of prescription drug. This is up from 48 percent just a few years ago in 2007-2008. As it turns out, the increased popularity of prescription drugs is having an effect on our nation’s water quality.

How do pharmaceutical drugs get in our drinking water?

Pharmaceutical drugs get into our drinking water in three main ways. Many people flush their old and unused pharmaceuticals down their toilets and sinks, which allows the drugs to end up in our water supplies. In addition, trace amounts of pharmaceuticals end up in our urine, which adds the drugs to wastewater and eventually back to our water supplies. Another way in which we can get these pharmaceuticals back into our systems, is fish and other sea creatures absorbing them, and then humans eating them.

Are pharmaceutical drugs monitored in our drinking water?

There are currently no regulations that require water treatment plants to test for or monitor the levels of pharmaceuticals in our drinking water. We do know, however, that these drugs are making it past our treatment plants and into the water in our homes.

According to a study published by the EPA, more than half of the nation’s water supplies that were sampled tested positive for oxycodone, high-blood pressure medications, over-the-counter drugs (Tylenol, Ibuprofen, etc.) and more.

What are the health effects of consuming pharmaceuticals in drinking water?

It is currently unclear how pharmaceuticals in drinking water affect our health. However, it is a growing concern among scientists and health officials. What we do know is that hormones work at very low concentrations in the human body, which suggests that the drugs can affect our bodies even though they show up in low concentrations in our water. In addition, the increase of pharmaceuticals in water has been affecting the hormones and reproductive process of the fish in our water supplies.

If you’re concerned about the health effects of pharmaceuticals in your water, your best defense is to install a EVOLUTION WHOLE HOME SYSTEM or a AURA ALKALINE WATER FILTER. Both of these residential water treatment systems will remove the traces of pharmaceuticals from the water you consume in your home.

Dangers of Fluoride in Drinking Water to Bottle-Fed Babies

Via: pregnancyandbaby.com

On March 22nd 2014, organizers at Clean Water California held a march and rally in downtown San Francisco urging local water companies and health officials to issue public warnings about the dangers of using fluoridated tap water for baby formula. Their concern stems from the fact that most Bay Area water districts encourage the consumption of tap water, yet do not inform parents that tap water fluoride levels could be harmful to newborns and infants which are more sensitive to this harsh chemical.

 

Water fluoridation is the practice of adding fluoride chemicals to municipal city tap water for the purpose of preventing tooth decay. This is a very controversial practice since fluoride can be toxic and any dental health benefits that come from ingesting it through drinking water have been largely inconclusive. In fact, some recent studies have associated fluoridated water with reduced IQ in children making it a possible neurotoxin that can damage young developing brains similar to lead and mercury. Parents that use tap water to make formula are often not aware that basic activated carbon water filters, faucet mount filters or boiling water methods do not remove fluoride or that babies are much more susceptible to harm.

 

According to the Fluoride Action Network, infants receive up to 400% more fluoride per pound of body weight, than adults consuming the same level of fluoride in water. Their underdeveloped kidneys can only excrete 15-20% of the chemical whereas adults can excrete more than 50%. In fact, any chemical, microbial or heavy metal contaminants in the water will be much more harmful to the growth and developmental health of not only babies, but also toddlers and young children, and should be removed.  Fortunately there are water filtration systems that can do just that.

 

We at Evolution Healthworks make the AURA ALKALINE WATER FILTER which is designed to remove the contaminants including Fluoride, and unlike other systems, the water is then remineralized to make the healthiest drinking water. The filter, is application specific, meaning it is tailored to fit your home’s exact contaminant levels and remove them.
Fluoride is a dangerous compound, and whether it is ingested or absorbed through the skin, the compound accumulates in the body and regardless of whether you’re a toddler, child, adult, or senior can cause numerous health problems such as dental fluorosis, arthritis, and reduced thyroid function. We recommend everyone to learn more about the benefits of removing fluoride from the water, especially those who have an infant or young child in the home.

 

 

10 Reasons You Should Be Using A Whole House System

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  1. Harmful chemicals evaporate into the air in your house from the shower, toilet, and sink.
  2. A leading cause of asthma and bronchitis is from air quality. When water contaminants are released into the air, poor air quality is the result.
  3. The standard shower filter, or even a countertop water filter can not protect the house from contaminants evaporating into the air.
  4. Shower filters, because they must filter water at extreme temperatures, are not completely effective at removing all dangerous contaminants.
  5. Skin rashes can and other types of skin irritations can occur because chlorine and volatile organic contaminants such as tri-halomethanes are embedded in your clothes when washed in chlorinated water.
  6. The dishwasher releases more chlorine into the air than any other water source in the house, besides the shower.
  7. The only way to make sure you are getting pure, clean, filtered water from every source in the house is a whole home system.
  8. While not to the level of a EVO FILTER, our Whole Home System purifies the drinking water and rids contamination to a very high level.
  9. Dermal absorption and inhalation are two ways the 2100 known water contaminants can make there ways into our bodies besides drinking the actual water.
  10. Avoiding tap water in exchange for bottled water is not a safe trade off. Check out 3 Reasons To Never Drink Bottled Water Again to learn more

 

Our EVOLUTION WHOLE HOME SYSTEM provides you with the solution to these issues. Our system removes chlorine and other dangerous components in your water such as fluoride, VOC (volatile organic compounds), sediment and turbidity. The Evolution Whole Home System is the best option to making sure you and your family are living in the most healthy, safe way.

10 Ways To Reduce Water Usage And Save Money This Summer

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Check out these 10 Ways to reduce water usage this summer and be sure to share them with friends and family!

  1. Reduce water usage in your morning routine – Keep a timer in your bathroom. Set your timer to 8 minutes each time you shower. This will remind you to get out of the shower faster, saving you time, water and money.

  2. Buy low-flow and water-efficient appliances – If you are in the market for new appliances, buy low-flow and water-efficient appliances.  These will save you money in the long run.  (i.e. A front-loading washing machine, uses 40-60% less water than top-loading machines)

  3. Place a jar into your toilet tank – Placing a jar or closed container full of water into your toilet tank will reduce the amount of water used by your toilet.

  4. Install low-flow shower heads and sink spigots – Installing a low-flow shower heads and sink spigots lower your water usage.  

  5. Run your dishwasher only when it is full – When running the dishwasher, make sure it’s full to get the maximum use per drop. There’s no need to pre-rinse, since most of today’s models can handle any kind of grime.

  6. Check and repair any leaky pipes and faucets – The tiniest leak has far greater impact on water usage than you would think.

  7. Don’t pour oil or other toxic liquids into the sink – One gallon of oil reaching the sewer can contaminate one million gallons of fresh water.

  8. Reduce water use in your own yard – Try collecting rainwater by placing containers at the end of each gutter. It’s perfect for watering your garden. Water your lawn or garden in the morning or the evening when the water will evaporate less rapidly, and limit pesticide use, as they will eventually be carried into our freshwater supply by runoff. Even more, get rid of your grass completely and replace it with rock or low water plants.

  9. Wash your car at a car wash instead of doing it yourself – A car wash typically uses about 32 gallons of water per vehicle, but the EPA estimates that washing it yourself can use up to 500 gallons of water.

  10. Take advantage of recreation opportunities on local lakes and rivers, and learn about the wildlife they support – It will help you understand what we could lose if we don’t manage our water wisely.