# Water - tap, spring, filtered or distilled - which is BEST?



## Trixyinaz (Oct 28, 2002)

I hear so many things about water and which type is best for people with IBS/IBD. First off, what's in tap that's not in spring? What's in spring that's not in tap? What is the difference between filtered and distilled?Finaly, which type of water is best for people with IBD/IBS?I've been drinking distilled water for about a month now b/c of all the chemicals in tap water, however, I just started reading "Listen to your gut" and the author only recommends Spring Water. Aren't there bugs and parasites in Spring water since the label on the bottle says "bottled at the Spring." I would think that would be the worst kind of water for you since it doesn't go through any type of filtration, etc. Or does it? After all, there is nothing protecting the stream from animals walking through it, drinking in it, taking a dump in it, peeing in it or a bird dropping it's stuff in it. Right?Any insight on this topic would be greatly appreciated. Curious minds need to know. Thanks!


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## CallMeColt (Oct 28, 2002)

Hello Trixy. I can't vouch for spring water because that is such as vague term, but I can tell you about distilled and filtered water. First off, I don't believe that one can say that distilled is better than filtered because it depends on the water quality BEFORE it was treated. Distilled water is essentially water (that was originally impure with trace organic chemicals, salts, and microorganisms) which was boiled, condensed back into the liquid phase, and bottled. This process will remove all microorganisms and salts or minerals. However, it may still contain trace amounts of organic chemicals if the original water had high amounts of volatile organic chemicals (VOC's). What these compounds are and how much are present may vary based on the source water and if any fractionation occurred during the distillation process.Now, filtered water is just like it sounds for the most part. If it is reverse osmosis filtered water, almost all of the salts and microorganisms are removed by a selective semi-permeable filter, which allows the "purer" water to pass through it. Then, usually the water will go through an additional filter containing activated carbon to remove the VOC's. Because of the carbon filtration step for removing VOC's that is usually part of the filtered water process,I would say that filtered water is better than distilled water. That is. assuming the impure source water before treatments is the same. Final water quality highly depends on the source when comparing one method versus another.


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## Trixyinaz (Oct 28, 2002)

Wow - Thanks Colt. I guess I will switch over to filtered water by reverse osmosis. You have no idea how much your response means to me. Afterall, I drink about a gallon of water a day so why not try to put the purist water into my body. Thanks!


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## WD40 (Jun 7, 1999)

I buy my water from a local bottler who uses carbon filtration and then reverse osmosis (or maybe the other way around, I don't remember). Our water here is well water so they have to treat it with chlorine when bacteria counts get too high...it's disgusting when that happens! I can't drink the stuff without it giving me D, so I switched to the bottled stuff, and it's never given me a problem. Plus it's cheap enough I even cook with it (like for boiling pasta or steaming veggies).


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## Mike NoLomotil (Jun 6, 2000)

Ahhh....the cool waters discussion....







I agree with Coltster...if you want the absolute straightest-water then ozonated R/O water is best. I use distilled water or ozonated R/O exclusively depending upon whichever is cheaper wherever I am buying it.Bottled water is such a racket. Municipal (tap) water charcoal filtered and sold at a buck a quart bottle as "drinking water"....oy vay. (Note...there are no hills in Zephyrhills Florida either as far as I could tell







)Spring water is indeed like saying "air". The basic constituents are there in each (H20, or oxygen, nitrogen and trace gasses)...its the "effluvia" that has utterly no consistency.Oh and I love when the anti-safe-anti-bottled water rabids spy a discussion like this, and come rising out of their flocculating tanks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon







and shout at everyone "There is nothing wrong with tap water...the water supply in the USA is perfectly safe you Morons!"







...so is a revolver with one round in the cylinder as long as you don't touch it.I guess if you disregard potential carcinogens and the occassional pathogenic oocytes that produce outbreaks of giardiasis and the like from time to time, sure, its "generally safe". Generally.Hopefully all the open-reservoirs that so many municipalties draw from will not be flavor-enhanced by any local "Allah-Ackbar-muttering" sleeper cell members in your community, then sure stick ya mouth right over the faucet and pump it in. Its yer body.Personally since bottled distilled or R/O is so cheap and they only give ya one life at a time, why add another variable? Costco really gives it to ya cheap by the case.







MNL


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

I do believe that to be considered potable (ie drinkable) spring water does have to be tested and micro-organism free, etc. I think some of it gets ozonated or stuff but most "spring" water is not from the open surface of the spring where the leaves drop in and the animals wander through it is often a tapped source so it comes from just a bit sub-surface.<dons asbestos suit> if you are concerned about teeth, make sure you do use fluoride tooth paste, or something unless you are rabidly opposed to fluoride in any form what-so-ever (and some people are) then ignore this....none of the bottled waters except for some that come from naturally fluorinated springs or that have it added will have fluoride in it<taking off asbestos suit>Reverse Osmosis from a lab perspective gives cleaner water than distilled water does. When we had a new lab built we had an R/O system installed and the level of impurities in the water was extremely low.Spring waters often have some mineral content depending on what rocks they "spring" out of.And just to muddy the waters up a bit, some bottled water is pretty much just someone elses tap water.Now ozonation vs chlorination..... Gack. I know if you do both the water is more mutagenic than either alone....but I can't recall off the top of my head if ozonated water (the byproducts of ozonation) is really better from a mutagenic stand point than the chlorinated water (the byproducts of ozonation) I remember there was one protocol where they wanted to ozonate the water first and then add just a jot of chlorine to keep the water sterile in the pipes, but when you choloronate the ozonated byproducts it was nastier than either alone.Now some of this has to do with what is in the water at trace amounts so the cleaner it is before you zap it the less byproducts you get...but just another thing to add to the mix.K.PS looked around from abstracts it is hard to get the whole story but it looks like generally ozonated water has a lower concentration of mutagenic byproducts....but I am not sure if the set of byproducts is the same level of mutagenicity. The more organics in the water when you treat it the more byproducts you get. The mutagenic risk of chlorinated water is really really low, and I suspect the risk from ozonate water is at least equally low (or they wouldn't let you do it......new technologies generally have to be either as risky or less risky before they can be implimented.The cancer risks we are talking about are in the less than one in a million range....so it isn't that 30% of people that drink chlorinated water get cancer....it is set up for most things so that there in a million people if they do X there will be one additional case of cancer that wouldn't have happened otherwise...that sort of thing....really really really low risks.Ok....I'll stop now before I really scare people


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## Trixyinaz (Oct 28, 2002)

Thanks everyone.


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## Mike NoLomotil (Jun 6, 2000)

Water water everywhere...such a fun subject!Observation...diseases acquired from drinking water are on the increase.Between 1999-2000 there were a total of 39 outbreaks involving drinking water in 25 different states as reported by the CDC.That is more than double the 17 outbreaks seen in 1997-1998.These outbreaks involve parasites like giardia and cryptosporidium, and bacteria such as e.coli and salmonalla.What does the CDC say?"Many of these drinking water outbreaks are preventable. Whether from the tap or bottle, the public should think about where their water comes from and whether it has been made safe."???? THINK about it and....??? How does the public do that and determine for itself (jonh and Jane Q, not us here who have all read up on water a little) when the needed federal funds for cleaning up the water system were declined 5 years ago, and many municipalities put water purification maintence and upgrades at the bottom of the budget priority list, since there is no hue and cry from the public about the water.Until an outbreak of giardia or crypto hits their community...As far as surface vs. subterranean sources go, there are sadly enough surface water sources used for municipal water supplies in the United States which are easily accesible to saboteurs, and the purificaton sytems for the effluvia thereof are generally inadequate to remove all possible pathogens or toxins,(for example, look into how many use turbidimeters alone to assess the performance of their filters







)that I would recommend that people determine in these times of Jihad exactly where their tap water is coming from and if it is a community using a surface water source...stock up on the bottled water du jour drawn from a different supply and which is RO/Ozonated or distilled at a minimum. They suck ours out of the aquifer, so all we have to worry about mostly is salt water intrusion (except that they are proposing using injection wells to store half-treated runoff, filled with toxins from fertilizers and cow dung and the like, until 'it's needed' then pump it back out...if that starts being done down here there is no telling what kind of intrusion we may end up with).As an aside, as a Floridian I am throughly amazed, in the face of the poor condition of our water treatment plants, the frequent droughts, the dwindling resources within the Florida acquifer, that the obvious solution has yet to surface...this is of course a rhetorical question in the context of Florida politics.But we are a peninsula, not unlike the Arabian peninsula, SURROUNDED by the worlds largest salt water supply. Can anyone spell "desalinization plant"? Apparently only the Saudis and their other nomadic oil baron brothers can.We tax the tourists for everything else down here (you have no idea how badly....)so...???







BUT there may be a breakthrough...I thought I heard that there is one being constructed over on the Gulf coast. Any enterprising entrepreneurs out there with access to desalinization technology, get in now from the private sector before the market catches fire!!! In the next drought it may literally do that!!!







Water water everywhere.....







Fire...I bring you to burn!MNL


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## Jan LEAP RD (May 19, 2002)

> quote: As far as surface vs. subterranean sources go, there are sadly enough surface water sources used for municipal water supplies in the United States which are easily accesible to saboteurs, and the purificaton sytems for the effluvia thereof are generally inadequate to remove all possible pathogens or toxins,(for example, look into how many use turbidimeters alone to assess the performance of their filters )that I would recommend that people determine in these times of Jihad exactly where their tap water is coming from and if it is a community using a surface water source...stock up on the bottled water du jour drawn from a different supply and which is RO/Ozonated or distilled at a minimum.


Living here in the Colorado Mountains, there are MANY reservoirs that pump their water to the various cities. People think of them as 'lakes' and swim, fish, and boat in those reservoirs. (There was even a bumper sticker saying "**** on Denver" with a caracature peeing into Dillion Resevoir!!! that was popular a few years ago.)And, what of all that spilled gas and oil from water skiers and power boats in the reservoirs?And, then, there's ALL the pills that hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, home health care and private citizens pee or dump into our water systems. A lot of cities use river/stream water that came from the other town 'upstream.' Our treatment plants are not yet able to filter out all the drug residues that end up in our water.And, my ex sold water treatment systems to large cities. He was appalled at how MOST, as of 10 years ago were wholly inadequate. Scary stuff out there.


> quote: They suck ours out of the aquifer, so all we have to worry about mostly is salt water intrusion (except that they are proposing using injection wells to store half-treated runoff, filled with toxins from fertilizers and cow dung and the like, until 'it's needed' then pump it back out...if that starts being done down here there is no telling what kind of intrusion we may end up with).


Yep. . . not to mention that we are draining our aquifers, with their million year stores of water in just a generation or two.And, more. . . What gets me was during our 'drought' in Colorado, these idiots that insisted on watering their non-native bluegrass lawn three times a week!!!



































"You could tell the dumb ones by their green-green lawns. . ." Anybody want to put this to music and sell it as a great song our next drought season?Then, there's 'softened' water. Lots of minerals and salts added to replace hard 'minerals' like calcium and magnesium. (Anecdotally, I've heard of people with crohn's disease finding that drinking or even bathing in softened water caused their symptoms. . .)Some VERY hard waters, due to the insoluable mineral content CAUSED diarrhea in certain people if they drank too much. (A problem for some when I lived in Eastern Colorado.)And, then around here, well water is so old, and so full of sulfer, and sometimes selinium from the shale, it's not really drinkable. . .And, then, the final problem of extreme pollution with plastic bottles if you buy your water in little quart bottles. (It always made me wonder to see somebody pay $1 for one large gulp (12 oz) of imported bottled water!!! Let's see. We'll use fossil fuels to make a plastic bottle. Then, we'll pour French water into it, after distilling/filtering it. THEN, we'll pay to have it placed in tree destroying cardboard boxes. THEN, we'll use more fossil fuels to SHIP it to the US. And then even more to load the boxes on a TRUCK and SHIP it across the country.Then, the customer uses more fossil fuels to drive to the store to buy it, and it's gulped down in 5 seconds. And, the consumer, as a last sigh, thinks, well, I can just recycle this bottle as they separate their recyclables. . .not knowing that over 50% of all plastics STILL end up in a landfill for the next million years because there are not enough buyers/users of recycled plastics yet. . .







Okay, okay. . . I'm getting off my soapbox now!







Obviously, I recommend treating your own tap water as the 'best' for the environment, if your local tap water isn't too horrible.


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## Mike NoLomotil (Jun 6, 2000)

jan, _____________________________________"He was appalled at how MOST, as of 10 years ago were wholly inadequate." _____________________________________Since the legislation for clean drinking water failed in , uh, 1996 or 7 (? I forget) not much has changed. _____________________________________"selinium from the shale" _____________________________________Cripes there's one I never even thought of! _____________________________________"Okay, okay. . . I'm getting off my soapbox now! _____________________________________Don't worry ypu have lots of company in high places...join CU and see what I mean...speaking of plastci if only they knew what comes OUT of the plastic wrap they put over babies food when it is being warmed in the microwave and then goes into baby....now THERE is a soapbox to climb on!MNLPSOK OK....pack my bags I am going on a guilt trip...







...its just that these little 8.5 oz bottles of distilled water fit in my pocket, my cupholder in the car, and in my hand so well...they are great travellers for a man on the move all the time!I promise to do my penance


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