What is the Best Kind of Water to Drink?

Are you afraid to drink water straight from the tap? Doesn’t taste good when you pour it into a glass? Most often, it is not so much the quality of the famous “taps” as the old pipes from which it comes out. 60% of Poles doubt that tap water is healthy.

Best Kind of Water to Drink
Best Water to Drink

What is the Best Kind of Water to Drink?

The quality of water in Polish taps has increased significantly in recent years and all thanks to investments made by municipalities in the modernization of water treatment plants and waterworks. Thanks to this, water from our taps is drinkable. And we Accustomed by large concerns to bottles, we spend about PLN 4 billion on store water every year. *

In stores, we have over 100 brands of water *, of which only 30 sells mineral water. The rests are deep spring water or tap water saturated with minerals. Is it worth buying it? According to experts – not necessarily.

Bottled business

Bottled business
Bottled business

The current legal situation means that so-called producers mineral water can poke us in a bottle. No one obliges them to name their products explicitly. Misleading descriptions, e.g., “natural spring water,” “natural mineral water” is misleading, because to be sure what water we are dealing with, we need to read the sum of mineral substances dissolved in it.

Mineral water is considered to be one that contains at least 1000 mg of mineral substances in 1 liter. Hand up, who pays attention to this information before buying water in a local store?

Bottles … in the woods

Bottles ... in the woods
Bottle water

But there is one more thing that can be frightening in bottled water. In Poland, we still do not have a common system for collecting and reusing water bottles. 80% of our country’s production (4.5 billion tons per year) ends up in forests, landfills, or furnaces.

Reusable bottles are gaining popularity in the world, and many of them are well-designed, practical, and aesthetic.
In Poland, bottled water is sold in PET packaging. According to German scientists, water stored in such packaging may be contaminated with substances that affect, among others, for problems with the endocrine system. It’s about bisphenol-A.

The one that manufacturers of baby accessories are so wary of.
Instead of bottles, it’s worth putting on tap water. The more that, according to the calculations of the former Mayor of London Livingston Cinema, bottled water is 300 times more harmful and 500 times more expensive than ordinary tap water.

Why a filter?

Water escaping from the water supply is chemically, microbiologically clean, and of good quality, which is confirmed by numerous regular tests. Such water does not need to be filtered. However, before it leaks from our tap, it goes a long way and gets out through the pipes in the building.

When we have old pipes in the housing estate we live in, or we live in a house where the pipes have not been replaced for X years, there may appear in the water, among other harmful compounds, including lead and copper. Also, tap water can be characterized by high hardness. This is the most common cause of stone formation, which further significantly reduces the taste of tap water.

Which filter should you choose?

1.Mechanical filters

1.Mechanical filters
Mechanical filters

Mechanical filters are the safest for our health and can be placed in almost any water installation, e.g., after a water meter. Such filters retain all larger contaminants, such as sand, sludge, or mud, without sterilizing mineral water. Mechanical filters are equipped with various types of cartridges.

It can be polypropylene foam that retains impurities in the interior or a pleated insert (best where there are large impurities). The good side of the harmonica is that you rinsed it and put it back in the filter so that you can use it repeatedly.

Impurities can also be trapped on a nylon mesh, which is also reusable.
If the water in our tap has too much iron, then ironing cartridges containing fine granules work well. Thanks to it, the water loses its metallic taste and is characterized by the right proportion of minerals and good taste.

2.Filters with carbon cartridges

2.Filters with carbon cartridges
Filters with carbon cartridges

Filters with carbon cartridges (used in jugs to filter water) that remove chlorine, responsible for bad smell and specific taste, are also becoming more and more popular. Coal also copes well with organic pollutants, herbicides, and pesticides. Some of these cartridges have bactericidal properties – they are usually enriched with copper and zinc or silver alloys.

3.Reverse osmosis filters

Reverse osmosis filters
Reverse osmosis filters

Reverse osmosis filters, considered to be quite controversial for years, have the highest effectiveness in the fight against pollution in water. It took time-consuming research to determine whether they are healthy or not and what values ​​water after such filtration has.

Today, we know a lot about their effectiveness. Despite this, the opinion about their controversy is still good.

Reverse osmosis filters work on similar principles as filters with carbon cartridges. They are also based on carbon filters made of coconut shells, except that the jugs have fairly small filters, making the ingredients permeable, which makes them less accurate for purification.

Reverse osmosis filters are the only way to drink medium-mineralized water, which has an optimal degree of mineralization for young children, and the elderly (highly-mineralized waters are suitable for athletes or specific illnesses).

The mineralizers themselves work in several different ways. It can be a capsule filled with lime and magnesium, but also a mineralizer based on dolomite, which flows around the water and then takes the necessary minerals from it in the same way as it does in a mountain stream.

Bioceramic filters contain tourmaline and mix water in a way that affects its clustering and ionization. Reverse osmosis filters are the best way to get rich, nutritious, close to natural water. One of the largest producers of such filters is Poland.

The quality of drinking water is essential for our health, and the World Health Organization reports that over 80% of modern diseases result from the amount of water we consume every day. Just because we buy water in a supermarket, even the more expensive one, does not mean that we choose the best for our health.

Especially behind bottled water, qualitatively most often not at all different from ordinary taps, tons of plastic will decompose in our environment for the next hundreds of years. The only question is: what is more profitable for us?

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