Many people prefer the taste of minerals in the water. Bottled water companies realize this and add minerals back into the water just for taste – not for health benefits.

Inorganic Minerals in Water

The minerals in tap water and bottled spring or mineral water are inorganic minerals, a form that the body cannot use. If you cook scrambled eggs in an iron skillet and the iron flakes off into the eggs, is that okay? No, of course not. It’s not the right kind of iron. Inorganic minerals can build up in the body and become toxic.

According to Dr. Norman Walker, over a 70-year lifespan, a person will be drinking about 200 to 300 pounds of rock that our body cannot use if it is not R/O (reverse osmosis) water. Most will be eliminated, but some stays in the body, causing gallstones, kidney stones, and hardening and blockages in the arteries. Many hospitals ask patients admitted for gallstones if they drink tap water.

Which Minerals Are in Drinking Water?

Calcium, magnesium, and lime are often found in city water. In addition, some cities and private wells often have manganese and iron, both of which can give the water a bad smell if found in high amounts. Other toxic minerals and heavy metals commonly found in the water, that usually have no taste unless present in elevated amounts:

• aluminum
• arsenic
• asbestos
• barium
• cadmium
• chromium
• copper
• fluoride
• lead
• mercury
• nitrates
• nitrites
• selenium
• silver

According to Colin Ingram, author of The Drinking Water Book, from where the above list of toxic minerals comes, “These toxic minerals and inorganic compounds occur naturally in water, and they also enter water from man-made sources…Asbestos is also present in tap water wherever asbestos-cement water pipes are used to deliver water to customers.” (p. 9, Celestial Arts/Ten Speed Press, 1991)

Organic Minerals in Water and Absorption into the Body

Our bodies need organic minerals that plants have transformed from the inorganic minerals in the soil into a negatively charged ionic or electrical form. We need to eat the plant, or eat the animal that ate the plant to get the form of minerals that our bodies can assimilate.

In a fairly comprehensive article entitled, “Not All Minerals Are Created Equal,” Dr. Steven E. Whiting, PhD. states that several factors affect mineral absorption and uptake. Dr. Whiting asserts that “pH, electromagnetic circuitry, particle size and source contribute to the final ability of the body to derive benefit from the minerals ingested.”

The issue is not one of liquid minerals or colloidal minerals, but whether or not the minerals are organic.

Dr. Whiting discusses in detail the biochemistry of mineral absorption in the human intestines in “Colloidal Minerals: Facts and Myths” (1997, Institute of Nutritional Science).

Water Softeners and Reverse Osmosis Filters

A water softener in your home can be a positive step to removing heavy metals and inorganic minerals from your drinking water. Yes, the water softener should be hooked up to both the hot and the cold water lines in your home. If you are really concerned about ingesting a minute amount of salt in your water (about the same amount as a slice of white bread in a whole gallon of water), you can buy R/O (reverse osmosis) bottled water or a reverse osmosis water filter system, or you can give yourself permission to get used to the taste of softened water knowing that it is much better for your health than ingesting inorganic minerals and heavy metals. An R/O filter will remove the salt and other contaminants in the water – whether it is well water or city water.

Why is Reverse Osmosis better?

The US EPA have recognized membrane processes such as Reverse Osmosis as a “best available technology” for meeting a wide variety of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulations.

Why use Reverse Osmosis purified water?

Reverse osmosis have become the water purification method of choice for drinking water in many households and bottling plants throughout the world. No wonder, as reverse osmosis has become the best and most efficient method to purify polluted and undesirable water into pure and tasty water.

­To understand “reverse osmosis,” it is probably best to start with normal osmosis. According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, osmosis is the “movement of a solvent through a semipermeable membrane (as of a living cell) into a s­olution of higher solute concentration that tends to equalize the concentrations of solute on the two sides of the membrane.” That’s a mouthful. To understand what it means, this picture is helpful: ­

­On the left is a beaker filled with water, and a tube has been half-submerged in the water. As you would expect, the water level in the tube is the same as the water level in the beaker. In the middle figure, the end of the tube has been sealed with a “semipermeable membrane” and the tube has been half-filled with a salty solution and submerged. Initially, the level of the salt solution and the water are equal, but over time, something unexpected happens — the water in the tube actually rises. The rise is attributed to “osmotic pressure.”

A semipermeable membrane is a membrane that will pass some atoms or molecules but not others. Saran wrap is a membrane, but it is impermeable to almost everything we commonly throw at it. The best common example of a semipermeable membrane would be the lining of your intestines, or a cell wall. Gore-tex is another common semipermeable membrane. Gore-tex fabric contains an extremely thin plastic film into which billions of small pores have been cut. The pores are big enough to let water vapor through, but small enough to prevent liquid water from passing.

In the figure above, the membrane allows passage of water molecules but not salt molecules. One way to understand osmotic pressure would be to think of the water molecules on both sides of the membrane. They are in constant Brownian motion. On the salty side, some of the pores get plugged with salt atoms, but on the pure-water side that does not happen. Therefore, more water passes from the pure-water side to the salty side, as there are more pores on the pure-water side for the water molecules to pass through. The water on the salty side rises until one of two things occurs:

The salt concentration becomes the same on both sides of the membrane (which isn’t going to happen in this case since there is pure water on one side and salty water on the other).

The water pressure rises as the height of the column of salty water rises, until it is equal to the osmotic pressure. At that point, osmosis will stop.

Osmosis, by the way, is why drinking salty water (like ocean water) will kill you. When you put salty water in your stomach, osmotic pressure begins drawing water out of your body to try to dilute the salt in your stomach. Eventually, you dehydrate and die.

In reverse osmosis, the idea is to use the membrane to act like an extremely fine filter to create drinkable water from salty (or otherwise contaminated) water. The salty water is put on one side of the membrane and pressure is applied to stop, and then reverse, the osmotic process. It generally takes a lot of pressure and is fairly slow, but it works.