We all know that the water you drink can help you lose weight. Here is the “8×8” rule recommended by most nutritionists: Drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day for weight loss and to maintain an ideal weight. You might need to drink more water if you exercise a lot or sweat heavily, or less water if you drink other beverages like herbal tea (make sure they are decaffeinated).
Unfortunately, most of us are not aware of a dire situation with tap water in the United States. We expect the water from our kitchen faucet to be clean and crisp, but there could be contaminants in it, some of which can be bad for health. Across the U.S., water is treated in large facilities where levels of 94 contaminants are regulated by the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency. If these requirements are met, the water is considered legal for drinking. But legal doesn’t mean safe. There are over 300 known contaminants that could be in tap water. In some cases, even if the water is legal when it leaves a treatment facility, it can become contaminated on its way through service pipes and into homes.
Just because there could be issues with your tap does not mean you should resort to buying bottled water instead. The bottled water market is virtually unregulated, and even the EPA says it’s not necessarily safer than tap. Plus, bottled water is terrible for the environment: Roughly 17 million barrels of oil go into a year’s worth of plastic bottles, according to The Pacific Institute. What’s worse, because of the low recycling rates in the U.S., roughly two-thirds of those bottles will wind up in landfills or eventually make their way to the ocean, polluting waters and harming wildlife.
The best what you can do is filtering your water at home. Ideally, you’d be able to buy a whole-house filtration system—but they can be really pricey. Or, you can invest in individual units for your kitchen tap and shower. The water pitcher also does a decent job of filtering.
Even if taste and odor are the main reasons you want to use a water filter pitcher, it’s a good idea to find out whether there are other contaminants in your municipality’s water that need to be filtered out.
Check the quality of the water in your area using https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/state.php?stab=CO
Once you know what you need to filter out, look for the certification mark on the pitcher packaging stating that it filters out those specific contaminants. It is good to know that most pitchers remove contaminants that leave a bad taste like chlorine, zinc, and hydrogen sulfide. And, only a few remove Lead, Arsenic, Fluoride, Nitrate and Nitrite, Barium, Selenium, Radium, pharmaceuticals, and hormones. To get rid of this contaminates you have to use ion exchange, reverse osmosis, and distillation. Most carbons filters ( like Brita) aren’t able to remove these contaminants.