RogerP":13296ra2 said:
Our cat (who is always kept supplied with a dish of clean tap water) prefers to trot off down the garden and drink from the fish pond. :roll: Not sure what she's trying to tell us.
Do you perchance cycle the water in your fish pond with a fountain or oxygenating pump or something (which is, of course, good for the fish)? Cats have an instinctive desire to drink running water if at all possible, because in the wild stagnant water quickly goes bad. You can get a variety of "Cat Fountains" for your pet which have small pumps in to cycle the water, which generally makes them much happier to drink indoors. Of course, there will always be exceptions!
Here's my anecdote: I used to drink nothing but filtered water all the time, because I was worried that the chlorine in tap water was possibly aggravating my acid reflux. Then about half a year ago my filter got lost and I had to drink tap water at work - and around the same time, my acid reflux largely cleared up and stopped bothering me. The mains water at the office I work in is supplied from a local spring, I'm told - comes up through the ground and gets filled with all kinds of muck before its brief journey through the processing/pumping plant and into our pipes.
I'm sure this has nothing to do with any other medical change I've had over the last year, of course...
RobinBHM":13296ra2 said:
Can you actually buy distilled water for drinking, or is a trip to Halfords?
Not to the best of my knowledge - because spring water is generally much better for you and also (happy coincidence) much cheaper to produce.
If you want distilled water for drinking then it's not hard to make it at home, and that's probably the best approach. All the distilled water I've seen available to buy off the shelf of late either comes from retailers and suppliers who aren't versed in basic hygiene operations because the water isn't considered potable (e.g. Halfords) or is actually de-ionised water and has been pre-perfumed for ironing with or whatever. I wonder whether our advocate means 'distilled' and not 'spring' or 'mineral' water (which is, of course, full of bits of rock)?
Of course, distilled water isn't going to be 100% H2O either. The production process is simply to boil water and condense and capture the steam, but... there are a lot of things in your average tap or river water which boil more readily than H2O, and therefore will also turn gaseous and end up in your condensate. Like Chlorine, or Ammonia! Look at the label image on
this product, for example - and note the "not for human consumption".
I'd rather drink the tap water with the small quantity of nutritious sludge per gallon than increase the proportion of Ammonia I'm drinking. The safest way I know of to get proper pure water is to burn hydrogen in a high oxygen environment (which is a bit dangerous) and capture the steam from that reaction and condense it. You'd need to use a perfectly clean distillery set, of course, but you could probably manage a decent approximation with careful and slow fractional distillation... but honestly, either of those methods easily push the cost-per-litre up to the point where I'd rather just have the (still relatively small quantity of) ammonia!
And of course the sludge contains things which are good for you. If people judged the nutritional benefit of their food entirely based on instinctive visual appeal, passionfruit would be considered toxic and Haribo would be included on every dietitian's list...
) on the body, then merely looking with revulsion will tell you nothing.
