The New York Times reports on a study which shows that chemicals used in plastics may be linked to childhood obesity.

The long-term health study found that obese children have higher levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals called phtalates, which are found in plastic products; oh yes, phthalates cause cancer, too. Other research has confirmed that endocrine disruptor chemicals in plastic, like phthalates and Bisphenol A (BPA), cause mice to become more obese.

A Kanasas Department of Health and Environment study found that 46 out of 80 bottled water samples contain phthalates. These toxic chemicals leach out of the plastic bottles into the water.

When plastic bottles are thrown away (at a rate of about 30 million per day in the U.S.), they end up in landfills, where they leach hormone-disrupting chemicals into the ground water. Ironically, the bottled water industry is polluting our tap water. (Or perhaps it’s not so ironic?)

If you want non-toxic water free from chemicals that will affect your hormones (and those of your children), then you need a home water filter, and you need to store your water in glass water bottles rather than plastic bottles.

Yes! Dr. Melina Jampolis recently addressed this question at CNN.com, where a reader asked:

Is it true if you drink lots of water, it will help you to lose weight? Is it bad for your body if you consume too much of it?”

Dr. Jampolis replies: “Research does suggest that drinking plenty of water may help you lose weight. An abstract by Dr. Brenda Davy, associate professor of human nutrition, foods and exercise at Virginia Tech, presented at last year’s obesity conference in Phoenix, Arizona, showed that people who drank two glasses of water 20 to 30 minutes before every meal lost weight more quickly initially and lost significantly more weight than those who didn’t.

“In another study by Davy and her group, published last year in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, she found that people who drank water before meals ate an average of 75 fewer calories at that meal. This may not seem like much, but if you ate 75 fewer calories at lunch and dinner for the next year, you could lose about 14½ pounds! In addition, being even 1 percent dehydrated can cause a significant drop in metabolism, which can also interfere with weight loss.” [emphasis added]

Can you believe that? Being just 1 percent dehydrated could be keeping you from losing that stubborn excess fat! Drinking plenty of pure water will speed up your metabolism and help you to shed pounds faster. But before you start guzzling a gallon a day, make sure there’s not rocket fuel in your water! If you drink too much contaminated water, you’ll overload your kidneys and slow down your metabolic rate. A home water filter will remove rocket fuel and other nasty contaminants from your drinking water.

“It is very difficult for the body to differentiate hunger from thirst,” continues Dr. Jampolis. “If you don’t drink enough water throughout the day, you may mistake thirst for hunger and eat more than you really need, which can also impair weight loss. So staying well hydrated is important, particularly if you are trying to lose weight. And don’t forget to eat lots of water-based foods like soups, vegetables and low-fat dairy, which are equally important for weight loss, as they lower the calorie density of meals. That can help you reduce calories without reducing portions.”

(Be sure to filter the water you use for cooking, too!)

“To answer the second part of your question,” continues Dr. Jampolis, “yes, drinking massive amounts of water (gallons and gallons) can cause a dangerous condition known as hyponatremia (low sodium levels in the blood), which can cause confusion, irritability and seizures and may even lead to a coma.

“This condition is very rare in healthy people but can sometimes be seen in the elderly or in endurance athletes who sweat significantly and drink water only to replace lost fluids. Most people should be far more concerned with not drinking enough water versus drinking too much.”

For more weight loss tips, see Water Quality and Weight Loss.

I recently watched the DVD Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Dr. Andrew Weil. If you want to learn how to live a naturally healthy lifestyle, I highly recommend watching this video. Dr. Weil covers all of the most important steps you must take to allow your body to heal itself, including purchasing a water purifier if you don’t already have one.

“I am very concerned about effects of environmental toxins on the healing system,” says Dr. Weil in the video. “I think that our total exposure, cumulative exposure, to toxins over time is a major reason for reduction of immunity, for the increase of cancer in the world, for the rise in chronic viral infections, and I think this is something that we really need to pay attention to.

“Some kinds of toxins you can do more about than others. One that you certainly can do something about is the water you drink . . . Bottled water is not very cost-effective over time, and there are questions about the purity of bottled water as well. There are many good water purifying systems out there.”

One of the best, most affordable systems is the Consumers Digest Best Buy Aquasana AQ4000 water filter. It removes over 99% of the most common contaminants in tap water for less than nine cents per gallon! The AQ4000 water purifier also comes with a lifetime warranty.

When you decide that it’s time to get healthy, then it’s time to invest in a water purifier. You can’t totally avoid toxins in your everyday life, but you can easily remove them from your water.

Fluoride is an industrial waste product that’s added to water under the guise of promoting dental health. However, you only have to look at areas without fluoridated water to see that it offers no benefit for dental health. In fact, fluoridated water can cause fluorosis, a condition in which the toxic chemical damages the teeth. This occurs primarily in children who ingest fluoride from an early age.

According to the Environmental Working Group, “Like bones, a child’s teeth are alive and growing. Flourosis is the result of fluoride rearranging the crystalline structure of a tooth’s enamel as it is still growing. It is evidence of fluoride’s potency and ability to cause physiologic changes within the body, and raises concerns about similar damage that may be occurring in the bones.”

“Common sense should tell us that if a poison circulating in a child’s body can damage the tooth-forming cells, then other harm also is likely,” says Dr. John Colquhoun, a dentist who wrote Why I Changed My Mind About Water Fluoridation.

Now there’s another reason to avoid drinking fluoridated water: Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control found traces of arsenic, copper, lead, and other impurities in samples of the chemicals used to fluoridate municipal water supplies between 2000 and 2006. Arsenic is classified as a likely carcinogen by the EPA, which sets the maximum contaminant level goal of arsenic in water supplies at zero. Unfortunately, if you’re drinking public water, you’re likely drinking arsenic.

Bottled water is no safer than municipal water. The FDA regulates bottled water in a rather odd manner. Here are the FDA standards for bottled water:

Domestic bottled water with no added fluoride may contain between 1.4 and 2.4 mg/L of fluoride.

In other words, the FDA has no problem with fluoride in bottled water.

“Fluoridation is irrational whether it’s coming from the tap or the bottle,” says Paul Beeber, president of the New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation. “It’s time to leave fluoride chemicals and all their contaminants out of every water source.”

A home water filter will remove these dangerous chemicals from your water.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, professor of surgery at Columbia University and frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, recently appeared on the show to talk about the importance of shower water filters.

“The best thing you can do for your hair costs less than 9 cents a day. Get a charcoal filter and put it on your shower head,” said Dr. Oz.

Dr. Oz recommends charcoal shower filters (carbon shower filters) as the best way to maintain healthy hair because they remove chlorine from the water. Chlorine dries out the hair and makes it brittle. A shower water filter will give you softer, cleaner hair and skin.

“You’ve got to treat [your hair] like a fine silk blouse that got wet,” Dr. Oz cautions. “If you’re blow-drying your blouse that got a little wet, or if you’re combing it backward over and over again, or if you’re too rough with it, it begins to fray. Your hair has to be dealt with extraordinarily gently.”

No tools are needed to install a shower water filter. You can enjoy the benefits of healthy shower water within minutes of receiving your new filter!

The Aquasana AQ4100 shower filter removes not only chlorine but also dangerous carcinogenic chemicals like THMs. THMs are chlorine byproducts, and most shower filters do not remove these chemicals. THMs become airborne whenever you turn on contaminated water, and you actually inhale them. To reduce your risk of cancer, make sure that your shower filter removes chlorine byproducts and other synthetic chemicals as well as chlorine.

Also see Why I Installed A Shower Filter to Remove Chlorine.

Despite the abundance of water in our society, many people are chronically dehydrated. This leads to increased histamine and cytokine production, which can cause allergies, asthma, pain, fatigue, depression, heartburn, high blood pressure, and sinus headaches.

Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, MD, author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water and founder of the National Association for Honesty in Medicine, states that he has cured thousands of cases of asthma with pure water. According to Dr. Batmanghelidj, water can also prevent and help to cure arthritis, back pain, angina, migraines, colitis, hypertension, and early adult-onset diabetes.

“You’re not sick; you’re thirsty. Don’t treat thirst with medication,” says Dr. Batmanghelidj.

Dr. Batmanghelidj points out:

• Your muscles are 75% water.
• Your blood is 82% water.
• Your lungs are 90% water.
• Your brain is 85% water.
• Even your bones are 25% water!

Your health depends on the quantity and the quality of the water you drink.

Give Pure Water a Try and Become Your Own Healer

“I did not invent water, says Dr. Batmanghelidj. “I only discovered its importance to health and wellbeing. As a doctor, I ask you to give water a try.”

“Understanding dehydration will empower you to become much healthier, and you will be able to become your own healer.”

“The information on dehydration is ground-breaking. The explanation I have been able to put together will educate the public about dehydration. And basically it will turn everyone into a healer of their own bodies. And they are in turn become healers for others around them. This is how information is spread so far.”

“Dry mouth is not the only sign of dehydration,” continues Dr. Batmanghelidj, “and waiting to get thirty is wrong. Pain in the body is a crisis call of the body for water. Thirst should be prevented. When body does not receive enough water and you have pain, that is a sign of dehydration.”

“Chronic pain of the body which cannot easily be explained as injuries or infection should first and foremost be interpreted as signal of chronic water shortage in the area where the pain is registered. These pain signals should first be considered and excluded as primary indicators for dehydration of the body before any other complicated procedures are forced on the patient.”

“Once you understand how the human body works, the wonderful simplicity of water as a free and permanently available choice of medication for so many health problem begins to make sense.”

“The role of water in the body of all living species, human included, has not changed since the earliest creation of life in water,” explains Dr. Batmanghelidj. “When life on land became an objective – the stressful adventure beyond – a gradually refined body-water-preservation system and drought-management system had to be created. In other words, the body began to adapt to transient dehydration. Over time, this drought-management process became permanent and currently exists in the body of modern humans.”

“When human bodies are under stress or confronting situations that may be perceived as stressful, the physiological translation of that stress reflects a water-dwelling species ventured beyond their water supply. A similar process for rationing water reserves and an anticipated limited future supply becomes the responsibility of a complex system in the body. This multi-system water-distribution process remains in operation until the body receives unmistakable signals that it has once more gained access to an adequate water supply.”

Communicate with Your Body

To achieve optimal health, you must listen to your body . . . and talk back to it! If you have dry mouth, your body is tellingyou that you’re dehydrated (and have been dehydrated for a while). To prevent further damage to your body, you need to talk back to your body and let it know that you have access to a water supply. Otherwise, your body’s dought-management system will take over, and this will eventually lead to chronic disease.

But wait!  Don’t drink just any water, especially if you already have a disease like an autoimmune condition. In fact, if you have an autoimmune disease, the Centers for Disease Control recommends that you consult with your physician before drinking ordinary tap water. Bottled water is not any better. Several studies have shown that most bottled water is just as contaminated – or even more contaminated – than tap water.

The best way to get healthy, pure water is to purify it yourself with a home water filter. Don’t let your bodies cries for pure water go unnoticed. Give your body what it needs to thrive, and live life to the fullest!