Tap Water: Contaminants, Risks, and Filtration Options

Tap water contains contaminants that may negatively impact health, but inexpensive filtration methods can make it safe to drink.

### Safely Drinking Tap Water: Understanding Contaminants and Affordable Filtration Options
* 💧 Tap water contains potentially harmful contaminants such as **disinfection byproducts (DBPs) and fluoride**, which can impact **thyroid function and reproductive health**.
* 🔬 Research suggests that even standard levels of fluoride in tap water (0.5 mg/L) can disrupt thyroid hormones, which are **crucial for various bodily functions**.
* It's recommended to check your local water quality report, available online by ZIP code, to understand the **specific contaminants in your tap water**.
* 🚰 Affordable water filtration options include pitcher filters like the Clearly Filtered water pitcher, which can **remove fluoride and other harmful substances**.
* 💰 Filter costs range from **under $100 for pitcher filters** to **over $2,000 for whole house systems**, providing options for different budgets.
* 🔄 A zero-cost filtration method involves letting tap water sit uncapped for some time to allow contaminants to settle, though this is **not as effective as filtration**.
* Some people may prefer to drink filtered water or explore alternative options like **molecular hydrogen water**, which can be made from tap water with added **magnesium**.
* 🌐 While it's important to address tap water safety, it's also crucial to **avoid excessive fear** and take practical steps to **ensure safe drinking water**.

Let's talk about tap water. And here I have to take a
deep breath, not a deep gulp, but a deep breath because
in researching tap water and what's contained in tap
water in different regions, not just in the US but around the world, I confess the picture
is a pretty scary one. I want to be clear, I'm not
somebody who naturally orients towards fear or conspiracy theories. However, in researching
tap water for this episode by way of looking at the
peer-reviewed research, meta-analysis, reviews,
specific research articles where specific hypotheses were tested, and in talking with experts
in toxicology and so on, it's a pretty grim picture, frankly, when one looks at what's contained in most tap water and
whether or not the compounds that are contained in
tap water are present in sufficient concentrations to negatively impact our health. And the bad news is that
much, if not all tap water, believe it or not

much if not all tap water contains things that are bad for the biology of our cells. There is a silver lining, however, and the silver lining is
that very simple steps that are very inexpensive can be used to adjust that tap water to
make it not just safe to drink, but that makes it perfectly fine to drink. So that's the good news, and
we'll get to that in a moment. If you are somebody who is interested in whether or not tap
water contains things like endocrine disruptors,
hormone disruptors that can negatively impact
reproductive health in males or females or both,
there's a wonderful review, wonderful because it's so thorough. Although the news isn't
great, it's very thorough, which is great, which is
entitled Endocrine Disruptors in Water and Their Effects
on the Reproductive System. This is a review from 2020 that analyzes water from a
bunch of different sources

within the world and essentially focuses on a few key components. First of all, it focuses
on the concentration of minerals that is magnesium
and calcium within water. Many people don't realize
this, but so-called hard water. Sounds terrible, right? But hard water is water that
contains magnesium and calcium, which turns out to be a good thing. Some water contains more
magnesium and calcium. Other water contains less. They looked at the presence of magnesium and calcium because that is
going to impact the pH of water. In general, the higher concentrations of magnesium and calcium in
water, the higher the pH. That is, the more alkaline that water is. And the lower levels of
magnesium and calcium, the more acidic or lower
pH that water tends to be. The other thing that this review addresses is the concentration of so-called DBPs, dog bulldog porcupines, DBPs, which are disinfection
byproducts contained in water.

So obviously, local governments, the government wants your
drinking water to be clean. They don't want contaminants in it. They don't want sewage in that water. They don't want chemical contaminants that are going to make
people immediately sick, so they treat water. Water treatment plants treat water with disinfection products, and those disinfection
products create things called disinfection byproducts. And the presence of those DBPs or disinfectant byproducts
can strongly impact the pH of water by way of
changing the concentrations of magnesium and calcium. Put differently, I do believe
that governments are trying to provide people with clean water, but in doing so, oftentimes,
we'll introduce things to that water that are not good for us. Now, it's very clear that DBPs can cause endocrine disruption in ways that are not good
for reproductive health. I did a very long, in fact, four and a half hour episode
on fertility and vitality. That was male and female
fertility, by the way.

and vitality. That, again, you can
find at hubermanlab.com that talks about all the
biological processes involved in the generation of
healthy eggs and sperm and creating a healthy
embryos, implantation embryos, and so forth. It's very clear that DBPs have been shown
to disrupt ovarian function, spermatogenesis, and fertility outcomes, even at concentrations
of DBPs that are present in drinking water that comes from the tap. Now, does that mean that you
shouldn't drink tap water? Well, the answer to that is a it depends. What does it depend on? Well, it depends on several things. First of all, I highly recommend
that everybody go online and put in your ZIP code
and ask for a water analysis of water that comes out of
the tap in that ZIP code. This is something that is
readily available online, at least to my knowledge. And unfortunately, there's
no specific one site

that I can send everyone to to get an in-depth analysis
of the drinking water that comes out of your tap. However, I highly recommend
that you go online and put in your ZIP code
or municipal area code and figure out whether or not
your water contains X amount of DBPs or Y amount of DBPs. Now, of course, you're going
to get a bunch of values back, and unless you're a toxicologist, probably not going to know
what those values mean. But what you're really looking for is whether or not there are high, low, or moderate levels of
fluoride in that drinking water. Why do I say that? Well, there are studies that show that the concentration of fluoride in drinking water is of particular concern for the thyroid hormone
system of the body. Now, thyroid hormone has
a lot of different roles in brain and body, and thyroid
hormone is very important for everything from metabolism
to levels of energy.

When thyroid levels are disrupted or if thyroid receptors are disrupted, it can lead to depression. When thyroid hormones are optimized, it can lead to optimal mood,
if there is such a thing. But in other words, it helps
keep your mood elevated. It relates to everything
from sleep to reproduction. Thyroid hormone is involved in many, many things, including bone health and tissue health generally. So essentially, every biological process in your body is impacted
by thyroid hormone. And there's a study that
I'd like to highlight, which was published in 2018, and the title of the study is Impact of Drinking Water Fluoride on Human Thyroid Hormones. This was a case-control study, so this is not an extensive
analysis of many individuals. However, what it shows is that fluoride negatively impacts
thyroid stimulating hormone and so-called T3 levels. So you have thyroid hormone T3 and T4. Even in the standard
concentrations that are present of

and here's an important number, 0.5 milligrams per liter, okay? So if you can get a hold of the fluoride concentrations
in your tap water and find out whether or
not the concentrations are at, below, or exceed 0.5
milligrams per liter, what you'll find is that even just 0.5 milligrams per liter of water can disrupt thyroid function, and this is going to
be a particular concern for people who have familial, so genetically related thyroid
issues, or that are concerned with keeping your thyroid
hormone levels healthy, which I think is everybody. So I am telling you that you
should try and get a hold of some data about the water
that comes out of your tap if you intend on drinking
tap water, and probably even if you don't. Just know
what's in your drinking water. Your local government should
provide that information and/or it should be
readily available online. And in particular, I think it's worthwhile

to address how much fluoride is present in your drinking water. Again, I don't want to
create a lot of scare. I'm not trying to trigger fear here. I do think, however, by
way of reading this review, by way of reading the
paper that I just referred to a moment ago, again, links to these
are going to be provided in the show note captions, that there is extensive
evidence that elevated levels of fluoride in drinking water
are simply not good for us. Now, that could open a whole
discussion of why fluoride is in our drinking water in
the first place at all. But leaving that aside, it seems to me that most everybody should
know how much fluoride is in their drinking water. And ideally everybody, yes, everybody is filtering
their drinking water. Now, that raises the question of how best to filter drinking water. And that brings an answer of it depends on a couple of things. First of all, how healthy

or unhealthy do you know yourself to be? Okay, so if you're somebody
who has no health issues, you have plenty of vigor,
you're sleeping well at night, you have no autoimmune disease, you're not aware of any health
concern, minor or major, well then, perhaps you're somebody that doesn't want to filter your water. I would argue that why wouldn't
you employ some very low or even zero-cost approach
to filtering your water? There are going to be other individuals who are suffering
particular ailments of brain or body or both that absolutely should be
filtering their drinking water if they're getting their
drinking water from their tap because it is pretty well established now that tap water contains a lot of these disinfectant byproducts
as well as, in most cases, exceeding the threshold of fluoride that we know to be healthy for us. How should you filter your tap water? Well, you have everything ranging from the so-called Brita type filters.

These are going to be carbon type filters, or other filters that you essentially put over a container or a compartment where you can pour the water over it, and it goes into the compartment below. Will those work? Are they sufficient to filter out the disinfectant byproducts? The general answer is yes, provided you change the filters often enough. However, it is not thought, unfortunately, not thought that they filter out sufficient fluoride. So what I highly recommend is depending on your budget that you go online and you search for at-home water filters that can filter out fluoride. There are a number of straightforward and inexpensive tools to do that. And here I don't have any relationship to any of the water filters or things that I'm going to mention now. I want to be very clear about that. There's no brand coder affiliation here. I'm simply trying to direct you to resources that will allow you to filter your tap water for it to be more safe for you to consume.

In a way that meets your budget, with the understanding that people have very different disposable incomes. So the range of costs here is going to be pretty tremendous. I just want to get that out of the way first. You know, there are water filters that you can use repeatedly. So these are what I'll refer to as pitcher filters that are less than $100. Now, keep in mind that that's a one-time purchase, except for the replacement of the filters, which, fortunately, doesn't have to be done too often. So there are different filters. I'll provide a link to one that I found that is, at least by my read, of the lowest possible cost. So this is the so-called Clearly Filtered water pitcher with Affinity filtration. So this is a filter that can adequately remove fluoride, lead, BPAs, glyphosates, hormones, and some of the other harmful things that are contained in most tap water. Again, I do realize that for some people,

even an 80 US dollar cost
is going to be prohibitive. But do realize that what you're doing here is
you're purchasing a unit that can be used repeatedly over and over. The reason why it's lower cost than some of the different filtration approaches that I'll talk about in a moment are that you can't really put
all the drinking water that you would use,
say, for an entire week or for an entire month in one pitcher. You're going to have to
repeatedly pour water into the pitcher in order to filter it. Now, as I mentioned before,
the range on water filter costs for filters that can
adequately remove fluoride and all the other things that you want out of your top water is immense. In fact, you can find, you know, whole house water filters that are, you know, $2,000 or more. Again, these are going to be filters that are going to be in your garage or in a laundry room

that are going to basically pull from the piping system of your house and deliver purified water. Technically, it's not purified, but that's removing these contaminants and fluoride from all
the sinks in your house. So you could effectively drink from any or all sinks in your house. That's what explains the higher cost. I think most people are probably not going to have the disposable income or have the opportunity to include one of these whole house filters. Although if you do have the means and it's important to
you, you could do that. And then there are going to be what I would call
intermediate systems. So systems that cost somewhere
between 200 and $500. Probably one of the more common ones or popular ones is a so-called
Berkey filter system. These are filter systems that, again, remove the things
that you want removed from your tap water and they can do it at higher volumes. And they're typically countertop units. They don't require any plugin, typically.

or they only require brief
plugin and electricity, and they're going to filter
out many, many liters or tens of liters of water, so that you can always have access to that clean, filtered
water anytime or day or night without having to
pour over into the pitcher. So I mention these different options because, again, I realize that
people have different levels of disposable income. As far as I know, there's no tablet or simple
mechanism that can be purchased as a transportable, you know, pill that you can just
simply throw in water and remove the contaminants. If anyone is aware of one that can adequately remove
fluoride and other contaminants, please put in the comment
section on YouTube. That'd be the best place so that I and everyone else can see it. But hopefully the mention of the different filtration systems that I mentioned will
give you some choices that I would hope would
fall within the range that one could potentially afford. An important note about
filtration, just as in our body,

there are mechanisms to
signal mechanical changes and chemical changes that
occur in our gut and our brain, et cetera, elsewhere. And in general, both mechanical and chemical changes are signaled across the body to
invoke different changes, whether or not those are, you know, a response of the immune system or to make us more alert
or more asleep, et cetera. So too filtration capitalizes on mechanical and chemical filtration. What I mean by that is
when you run a fluid, water or any other fluid through a filter, those filters are doing two things. They are physically constraining which molecules can go
through by creating portals, pores that allow certain
size molecules to go through and not others. And almost always, they contain certain
chemicals themselves, right? Those filters have been
treated with certain chemicals that neutralize certain
other chemicals, okay? So you may be wondering
how when you filter water, you know, magnesium and
calcium can get through.

but fluoride doesn't. And that's because these filters have been very cleverly designed in order to neutralize fluoride, or to prevent large molecules,
such as sediment and dirt, which is kind of easy to
imagine being filtered, but also to allow certain
small molecules like calcium, which is small-ish, or
magnesium, which is small-ish, to still pass through
into our drinking water. And this is wonderful,
because what it means is that by filtering our water
using any of the methods that we talked about before, you're still going to
get whatever magnesium and calcium was present in that water while still adequately
removing the fluoride and other disinfectant byproducts. Now, what if you can't
afford any of those options? Okay, well, here you have an interesting
zero-cost option. It's not as good as the other
ones at filtering that water, but it is an option, and I do think it's
important to give options.

to people who don't have any disposable income for the purpose of filtering their water, which is to draw a gallon or five gallons or maybe even more tap water out of the tap and put it into some container, some vessel. So it could be one gallon, five gallon, 10 gallon container and then to let that tap water sit for some period of time to allow some of the sediment to drop to the bottom. Now you might say, well, there's no sediment. There's nothing contained in that tap water and isn't fluoride diluted in the water? And indeed, the answer to that is yes. However, there is some evidence that letting tap water sit out at room temperature and outside the pipes that deliver that water can help remove some, not all of the contaminants in that water. If however, you are filtering the water using any of the methods that I talked about a few moments ago, you do not need to do this, okay?

I realize there's a whole world out there of people who insist
on putting their water in the sun or only keeping
it in certain containers and putting it out for a few
days before they ingest it. That, to me, seems a bit extreme. If you want to do that, be my guest. But I don't think most
people need to do that. However, I do believe that for people who have zero
disposable income to devote to paying for any kind
of filtration system for their tap water, that
taking that tap water and putting it into some
container at room temperature and keeping it room
temperature for a half day or a day or more, and then
pouring off the top two-thirds of that water into another
container and consuming the water from that second container
is going to remove some, not all of the contaminants that one would need to be concerned about. And here I should mention something that I neglected to
mention a few moments ago.

If you're going to do this zero-cost option and let the water sit out for a bit, you would want that water to sit uncapped. Sorry, I should have mentioned that before. Uncapped, of course, trying to keep things from falling into that water. In fact, you could even put a little bit of cloth above it. So you don't want things falling into that water but you want certain things to be able to evaporate off. And you also want some of the sediment to drop down. And the reason why this process of letting water sit out would work at all is because many of the contaminants contained within water are not present because of the source of that water or even the treatment of that water but rather because of the pipes that that water arrives to your glass or the pot that you have from, okay? And here again, there is an infinite number of variables. So some people are living

in buildings for which the pipes are very, very old, but very, very
clean, believe it or not. Some people are living in newer buildings and structures that have new
pipes, but for which the seals between those pipes contain
things that are not good for you to consume. So by letting water sit out for a while, you are able to remove some
of the contaminants present within the pipes of your
home and the building, and even the pipes that lead
to your home or apartment. Now, some people get really obsessed with this whole tap water thing and really want to find
out all the details about the pipes and
what sorts of, you know, hard metals and how much magnesium and how much calcium are
present in their water. There are ways that you can
test your drinking water for those sorts of things. Most people, I realize, including myself, are simply not going to do that. If you want to know what I do, I tend to drink water that is filtered.

through one of these lower cost filters. Or if I'm going to be
consuming a lot of fluid, I will drink certain kinds of fluid that later I'll tell you.
I've been doing an experiment for the sake of this episode looking at so-called molecular hydrogen water, which sounds very fancy and esoteric and almost a little wacky, but it turns out has largely to do with the amount of magnesium and calcium and the pH of that water. So if you are somebody
who has a very low budget or simply just wants to
spend a very small amount of money and try and
still drink tap water, there is absolutely a
way to do that safely. But it does require a few of these steps. [MUSIC PLAYING]

How Bad Is Tap Water for Health? | Dr. Andrew Huberman

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Huberman Lab Clips

Research shows that tap water contains compounds that can negatively impact our health, including endocrine disruptors.

However, simple and inexpensive steps can be taken to make tap water safe to drink.

The concentration of minerals like magnesium and calcium, as well as disinfection byproducts, can affect the pH of water and its overall safety.

The Impact of Drinking Water Fluoride on Thyroid Health

Drinking water can contain DBPs that affect ovarian function, spermatogenesis, and fertility, as well as fluoride, which can disrupt thyroid function even at low concentrations.

It is important to obtain and understand the water analysis for fluoride levels in your local tap water to make an informed decision about drinking it.

This is particularly crucial for those with genetic thyroid issues or anyone concerned about maintaining healthy thyroid hormone levels.

Elevated levels of fluoride in drinking water have been shown to have negative effects on health.

It is important for everyone to be aware of the fluoride levels in their water and consider using at-home water filters to ensure safety.

There are a variety of filtering options available, with some specifically designed to remove fluoride, catering to different budget needs.

Cost and Effectiveness of Water Filtration Systems

Water filtration systems vary widely in cost, from $80 pitchers to $2000+ whole house filters, making it accessible to different income levels.

The range of options allows for the removal of contaminants and fluoride from tap water at different volumes, providing choices for users.

Filtration systems work through both mechanical (pore size exclusion) and chemical (treatment of filters) processes to effectively remove specific molecules from the water.

Water filters are designed to neutralize fluoride and remove sediment and dirt while allowing small molecules like calcium and magnesium to pass through.

Letting tap water sit for some time at room temperature can also help remove some contaminants as a zero-cost filtering option.

This method is especially helpful for people who cannot afford other filtration systems.

Letting water sit uncapped allows contaminants to evaporate and sediment to settle, potentially improving its quality.

The process is especially beneficial for those living in buildings with old or poorly sealed pipes.

Alternatively, using a low-cost filter or molecular hydrogen water can also provide a safe drinking water option.