Is Your Drinking Water Damaging Your Health?

Sunday, 05 Apr 2015 03:37 PM

By Sylvia Booth Hubbard






The adult human body is about 60 percent water, and every system in the body depends on water to function. Making sure we drink enough every day is essential for good health, and the amount many health experts recommend is eight 8-ounce glasses every day. But if you're drinking the wrong kind of water, you can be increasing your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other conditions.

Have you substituted bottled water for tap water? Or does your drinking water come from a well? If so, you could be at risk.. Read on to discover three ways the water you drink may be wrecking your health.

• Magnesium deficiency. Magnesium supports more than 300 metabolic processes, including regulating blood pressure and heart rhythm and the proper absorption of calcium. Health experts say as many as 80 percent of us fail to reach the RDA of 360 milligrams daily for women and 420 milligrams for men. Older adults are especially vulnerable. Bottled drinking water is making the situation even worse, since many people have swapped tap water, which is a significant source of magnesium, for bottled water, which contains far less. Typical symptoms of magnesium deficiency include insomnia, anxiety, pain, muscle cramps and weakness, restless leg syndrome, abnormal heart rhythms, and fatigue.

• Arsenic. Arsenic is a deadly poison, and a study at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that even trace amounts that naturally occur in well water double the risk of developing and dying from heart disease, stroke, and atherosclerosis. The Environmental Protection Agency's limit on arsenic in drinking water is 10 parts per billion, but the standards only apply to municipal water utilities. Arsenic levels are much higher — sometimes as much as 100 times higher — in well water in some areas of the country, particularly in northern New England, the upper Midwest, and in the Southwest.

Numerous studies have found links between arsenic and poor health. A study at New York University found that smoking intensified the damaging health effects of arsenic, and a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a link between arsenic in drinking water and diabetes. An additional study by the National Academy of Sciences found that drinking water causes skin, bladder, and lung cancer.

• Fluoride. "Fluoride is a very powerful cardiac poison," says Dr. Russell Blaylock, renowned neurosurgeon and editor of the Blaylock Wellness Report. "Fluoride was added to drinking water to reduce cavities, but even the American Dental Association has admitted that fluoridation doesn't reduce the number of cavities," Dr. Blaylock tells Newsmax Health. The U.S. regulatory agencies admitted that 3 parts per million of fluoride in water produces severe fluorosis of the teeth and bones, is neurotoxic, is a cell toxin, and produces organ damage.

"Dentists that I know say they can always tell when a patient has been drinking fluoridated water because the enamel of their teeth is soft," Dr. Blaylock says. "Fluoride destroys the teeth — that's what fluorosis is. It just starts making little pits in the enamel, and the whole idea was that you were supposed to be making your teeth stronger. It doesn't — it destroys them.

"Fluoride can also injure the nervous system and even cause cancer," says Dr. Blaylock. "Degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's are possibly linked to drinking fluoridated water. Cancer, behavioral problems, thyroid suppression, male infertility and impotence are also some examples of what may happen to the body when too much fluoride is present.

"Once in the body, fluoride is very difficult to remove, but some nutrients, including vitamin C and magnesium, can decrease its toxicity," says Dr. Blaylock.

© 2015 NewsmaxHealth. All rights reserved.

http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Headline/drinking-water-health-dangers/2015/04/05/id/636533