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A Message From Lono |
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Having an adequate supply of clean, healthy water is vital to a disease-free life. We all know that, but few people understand either water or water treatment technology enough to insure that their supply is safe and healthy to drink.
It was my quest for healthy water that led to my book "Don't Drink The Water" published by Lotus Press. Since its introduction it has become the best-selling book on water ever published in the country. Much of its success is due to its endorsement by Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D., a man whose work I deeply appreciate.
In doing research for my book the more I discovered, the more I became concerned. Like most people I thought that the water coming from my tap was safe to drink - especially because my home at the time was the high mountain valleys of Colorado where people were proud of their unpolluted (or so they thought) environment.
Where I grew up, the source of our drinking water was the headwaters of the Arkansas River. Like most places our town disinfected the water with chlorine, and added fluoride. The high levels of naturally occuring arsenic were ignored.
When I discovered that high levels of arsenic and fluoride are capable of causing bone cancer, I couldn't help but remember my grandmother who died from that horrible disease after drinking that water most of her life.
I was about 8 years old at the time. My grandmother was the light of my life. One day she rolled over in bed and her arm broke. Not long after that a huge ugly bulge began growing on the side of her head and all her hair fell out. The next thing I knew is that I was looking at her body in a coffin. I remember thinking that the body of the woman I loved so deeply, that had meant so much to me, was so strange lying there. I was told that it was her, but it looked more like a wax figure than the grandmother who not long before was cooking Sunday dinner for the family. It was my first experience with death, and one I found very hard to reconcile at my young age.
As a child it never occured to me that drinking the arsenic/fluoride contaminated water could have been the cause of her cancer. Nor did it occur to me that so many of my schoolmates had mottled teeth for the same reason. After all, our water came from the mountains and we were first in line. Water pollution was something those poor people who lived in the big cities had to worry about - not us. In the meantime, no one suspected that the reason so many people died of cancer in our community might be our arsenic laden water supply.
Today, over 50 years later, not much has changed in my old home town. Arsenic and fluoride levels are still high, leaking underground fuel storage tanks have polluted the aquifer, and most people still think they have no reason to buy a water treatment system. After all, water problems are something city people have - not people who live in the high mountain valleys of Colorado.
Of course as I grew older and learned more about water, what I discovered is that most modern drinking water supplies contain a variety of contaminants that can cause serious illness, especially when consumed over time.
Many private wells are polluted with things that can't be either tasted or smelled. These include dangerous microbes, heavy metals, gasoline additives, radioactivity, and the residues of agricultural chemicals.
Municipal water has its own set of problems - not the least of which are added fluoride, chlorine, chloramines, trihalomethanes (disinfection by-products of chlorine), chlorine resistant cysts like Cryptosporidium, hormone residues, pesticide residues, and difficult to remove heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and more. Not only that, but water treatment plants rely on complicated machines that break down - and this happens far more frequently than most people realize.
What I also discovered is that there are a lot of water treatment systems available out there, most of which do little more than improve water's taste or appearance. The popularity of faucet-mounted filters and water pitchers are examples of nearly useless water treatment appliances that can actually become ideal breeding grounds for bacteria.
More difficult to take are those companies that use hype and misinformation to sell overpriced products that actually make water more dangerous. Examples of these are the many systems coming out of Japan and Korea that purport to make water healthier to drink by creating an alkaline stream of water using electrolysis. These things actually concentrate dangerous ions like arsenic, lead, and fluoride in the product water because of the way they work. Because knowledgeable water treatment professionals would never make the kinds of claims that are necessary to sell these things, they are sold mostly by well-meaning, but woefully misinformed people through multi-level marketing programs.
Fortunately, real water treatment science has advanced to the point that if you are willing to take the time to arm yourself with the appropriate information, it is not only possible but also relatively inexpensive to have an adequate and reliable supply of clean healthy water. I have outlined 10 important goals an ideal water treatment system should strive to meet. Check them out and see if you don't agree that these goals are nothing more than common sense. As you investigate further you will be amazed at how few of these goals most water treatment appliances actually achieve.
Finding the best way to meet these goals is how why the people at LIVINGWATERS® water treatment systems asked me for advice on how to design an ideal water treatment system. The rest is history. Since their introduction to the marketplace in 1988 I am proud to say that these systems have quickly become the standard for the highest quality, most reliable drinking water systems in the world. |
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