And, to some extent, I eat mostly organic and raw foods and try to stay healthy, vibrant, and fully alive.

So I avoid exposure to toxins as much as possible. This includes chlorinated city water.

This demonstration shows how quickly chlorine is absorbed by your skin.

There’s nothing magic about it. Your skin is like a sponge that soaks up the water in the glass and along with it the chemicals in that water.

The addition of chlorine to public water supplies essentially eliminated water borne disease. But chlorine itself is not without consequences. Chlorine is a poison, as we all know, and it’s absorbed in the skin in the shower and in the body when ingested. Chlorine ingestion has been linked to numerous cancers.

You can learn more about this by visiting by resource library here, which contains numerous articles on a variety of contaminants but in particular I’d like to point out these two:

1. The Negative Health Effects of Chlorine by Joseph Hattersley. This study cites numerous negative consequences to those who consume chlorinated water. I encourage you to read this if you are at all interested. The effects on women and children are of particular interest.
2. Disinfectants Create Toxic Byproducts—This study by the University of Illinois addresses some of the compounds created when chlorine interacts with organic material in water.

Disinfection byproducts are regulated by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If you’d like to confirm their presence in your water simply obtain a copy of your local water report. Your water provider is required to give this to you once each year.

The report will list the type of disinfection used, typically chlorine or chloramine (a toxic combination of chlorine and ammonia) and two groups of chemicals called the Trihalomethanes and Haloacetic acids. It is these two groups of compounds that are known carcinogens.

In order to drink and bathe in healthy water you need to remove the chlorine from your drinking water and from your shower water.

But it’s not as simple as going out and buying the first water filter you see. There are other contaminants that may influence your buying decision. For help in making that selection I suggest you watch this:

This is an important issue to maintaining your health. It is my hope that this information proves useful in guiding you.

It’s the things we do every day—eating organic food or ingesting pesticides or drinking appropriately filtered water or ingesting chlorine—that keeps us healthy or kills us in the end…

Namaste’

James P. McMahon studied ecology at the University of Illinois and deep ecology at Naropa University. Jim started Sweetwater LLC in September 2002. He works from his home overlooking the Santa Clara River in southern Utah. You can learn how to make your water healthy at cleanairpurewater.com.

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Ed: Lynn Hasselberger