Tag Archives: reverse osmosis

5 Reasons Reverse Osmosis is Bad For Your Health

reverse osmosis bad

If you’ve researched water filter systems for your home, then you are probably familiar with reverse osmosis.

For those of you who are not familiar, reverse osmosis is commonly described as the most complete way to filter your water. In some ways, this statement is valid. Reverse osmosis uses a membrane to very finely remove almost all dissolved solids from tap water.

This sounds like a great system, right? After all, the point of water filtration is to take out all of the bad substances and leave us with safe water.

It’s not that simple, though.

To get truly safe and healthy water, it’s very important to consider the adverse effects of drinking water that has no beneficial constituents.

The World Health Organization released a report summarizing some eye-opening findings about reverse osmosis and the “demineralized” water it creates. Below are 5 reasons from the report that reveal why reverse osmosis is bad for your health.

 1. It leads to mineral deficiencies 

Water is the universal solvent. When it is demineralized – or run through a reverse osmosis system – it aggressively seeks new metals and minerals to leach and absorb.

This becomes a problem when you RO water – it leaches beneficial minerals such as calcium and magnesium from your body.

Studies from around the world over a fifty-year period agree that water low in calcium and magnesium leads to a higher rate of bone fractures, cardiovascular disease, pregnancy disorders and some cancers.

2. It makes you urinate more

This might sound obvious – of course drinking water results in more trips to the restroom – but it’s more complicated than that.

Reverse osmosis water throws off water homeostasis in the body, causing a 20% increase in diuresis (aka need to urinate).

3. It negates the nutrients you get from food

Most reverse osmosis companies will advise you to use your demineralized water for cooking. While cooking with the right water can make a significant difference, this is NOT the case for reverse osmosis.

The study explains that cooking with demineralized water actually removes about 60% of the beneficial minerals from your food. Since the majority of our nutrients come from what we eat, cooking with demineralized water can be very detrimental to your dietary health.

4. It leads to more toxic chemicals in your water

Just as reverse osmosis water is likely to absorb minerals in your body, it is also highly aggressive to materials with which it comes into contact before entering your body.

It readily dissolves metals and organic substances from your sink’s pipes, coatings, storage tanks, hose lines and fittings before entering your glass.

Low-mineral water intensifies the leaching process, raising your chances of getting lead poisoning from your kitchen’s plumbing.

5. It’s less thirst-quenching

The report explains that since demineralized water throws off homeostasis in the body, it leads to more thirst.

What’s wrong with a little additional thirst? It means more of all the problems listed above. Welcome to the vicious cycle of reverse osmosis.

 

What’s an acceptable alternative?

It’s important to look for a Drinking Water System that reintroduces healthy trace minerals to your water, in addition to removing harmful contaminants.

The Aura H2O Water Filter not only removes 99.9% of contaminants, but also adds minerals such as calcium and magnesium back to your water. Also, the Evolution Healthworks system wastes no water, compared to the average reverse osmosis system that wastes about 5 gallons for every 1 it filters.

 

More info: The World Health Organization on Water, Sanitation and Health
Protection and the Human Environment 

 

Getting drinking water from the sea, but for a price

9-desalination-plant

The ongoing severe drought in California is the just the latest in a recent series of water crises that have kept large areas of America parched.

Parts of Texas and the Southwest are still recovering from historic drought conditions that dried up the region several years ago. And given global climate change and the world’s growing population, the costly process of desalination — turning ocean or brackish water into clean, drinkable fresh water — is being considered a viable option in California and elsewhere.

In California alone, 17 desalination plants are either under construction or being planned, including the $1 billion Carlsbad facility near San Diego, scheduled to open in 2016. Once fully operational, that plant is expected to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water a day.

“We’ll produce enough water to meet the daily needs of 300,000 San Diego residents,” Peter MacLaggan, senior vice president at Poseidon Resources, the company partnering with the San Diego County Water Authority on the project, said last month. “We’ll have at least one water supply that’s drought-proof — it won’t matter whether it snows in the Rockies or rains in the Sierras.”

That desalinated water, however, won’t be cheap.

“When you want to desalinate, it’s incredibly energy-intensive, and therefore cost-intensive,” said Michael Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “And that’s the rub of it. It’s drought-resistant, it’s abundant, it’s never going to go away, but it’s costly to do.”

There are two main desalination processes. Thermal, as the name implies, involves heating salt water and then distilling pure, drinkable water from the steam. And there’s reverse osmosis, the process Carlsbad will use — where sea water or brackish water is forced through filter membranes that remove the salts.

Thermal desalination is huge in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. That method makes economic sense there, says Webber, “because they have energy but don’t have water, so they trade energy for water.”

California also expends a lot of energy — as well as hundreds of millions of dollars annually — to store, pump and deliver water across the state.

The question, then, is whether Californians will be willing to purchase the expensive water that desalination facilities produce. As an example, Webber points to the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination facility in Florida, which can produce up to 25 million gallons of drinking water daily. But due in part to the cost, the Tampa Bay plant is rarely run at full capacity.

Desalination can make economic sense when it’s combined with good design and proper integration into a region’s infrastructure. And given its growing use worldwide — industry website Desalination.com says more than 60 million cubic meters of drinking water are produced worldwide daily by desalination — technological advances could help reduce the cost of turning salt water into fresh water.

“I do see that water is the next oil,” Webber notes, “that water is the great resource of the 21st century over which battles [will be] fought, money is invested.”