I hate to tell you this, but there's a good chance you're drinking contaminated drinking water. I don't care if your water comes from a well or your city's treatment plant. There's a very good chance it's got contaminants in it that you probably would not want to be ingesting. Let me tell you what I mean.

I don't mean that you're going to get some waterborne disease like cholera by drinking water, at least not in the United States and virtually all other developed nations. No, because of water treatment and especially chlorination, cholera is not longer a threat.

What I do mean is that what you are drinking is contaminated drinking water, which has other, less well-known contaminants in it. Things like lead, various pesticides, prescription drugs, and a whole host of other really nasty chemicals have routinely been found in our water systems.

Just to prove that to you, let me cite two studies. One was done by Ralph Nader's group. They studied several American water systems and found over 2,100 toxic chemicals in the drinking water. Another similar study of 29 American cities found traces of pesticides in the water systems of all 29!

If asked about these contaminants, water treatment facilities and governmental bodies always say that these chemicals are present in concentrations that are less than the federal guidelines. But frankly, from the research I've done on the subject, many of those federal guidelines are guesses, at best.

Take the amount of waterborne asbestos that the federal government says is okay to have in our water. (Yes, they do say it's okay!) The only reason they came up with their recommended parts per million that asbestos can't exceed is because they can't make finer measurements. That's not really good science, in my opinion. It certainly isn't good public health policy!

Another issue about contaminated drinking water that is rarely discussed by the agencies who are supposed to be protecting us is the effects of low levels of many contaminants. They always say that you shouldn't have over such and such parts per million of lead in the water, but they fail to take into account the synergistic effect of ingesting lead, pesticides, aluminum, and several other toxic substances. Basically no one knows the effects of these combinations of toxic chemicals in our water.

So, what can we do about contaminated drinking water? Well, the conclusion I came to was this. I realized that to protect my health and my family's health, I was going to have to buy a really good water filter and just filter all our water. Of course, now you'll have to learn about various water filters, but believe me, it will be worth it!