Here are some very basic reasons why I would rather not drink natural spring water.
Cryptosporidium, Giardia, Clostridium, Legionella, Salmonella and Hepatitus A.
I think they’re good reasons.
These genera of microorganisms (the last one is a virus) are just a very tiny sampling of some lovely little critters that are found in pretty normal water. Listen up “natural food movement”. These are not chemicals, they are not “man made additives”, or results of “processing”. They are exactly the opposite. These microorganisms are about as “natural” as it gets. Single celled, hundreds of millions of years in the making, and enough of them will kill the crap out of you. That’s not just a figure of speech, a lot of waterborne pathogens keep you from holding anything in your intestines.
Recent events (actually, they’re daily events, but some get on the news more than others), have got me thinking about water. The recent Cholera outbreak in Haiti will tell you the tragedy of what happens when you can’t process your water. The lack of water treatment literally plagues all of civilization that doesn’t have it, and it’s not a “modern” problem. Untreated water, depending on where it comes from, usually won’t harm every person, but it is enough of a challenge for the bodies of the young, the old, and the ill to keep populations small and stagnant. The increase in human population that came with the development of cities and civilizations was directly correlated to water technology.
Wastewater treatment could be the single most important everyday technology that has allowed developed countries to become well, developed (along with the plough). A large part of what allowed the Roman empire to become so successful was the construction of huge waterways that carried clean water from the mountains to the cities. Why the mountains? When water condenses and then rains or falls as snow to these high altitudes, it doesn’t carry very many pathogens with it. Storing water in the form of ice or cold water on top of mountains is also pretty beneficial, because it’s too cold for most of these things to live. Then, it trickled down in fast moving streams and straight to the cities via enormous aquaducts. The Romans understood this (though not in those terms), and this is why even in cities that were on lakes and rivers, the Romans built ways to get water from higher ground. After being used by the cities, the water washed away the wastes to fester in the sea, where the salt content actually keeps the water pretty “clean”. Most bacteria, like people, can’t drink salt water.
Modern infrastructure to clean water is phenomenal. It could be the most ingenious mix of using plants, bacteria, manmade chemicals and filters to provide what we get on tap. Processes range from chemical scrubbing of pipes, massive filtering and oxygenation of water, to my favorite “activated sludge”, only because it sounds like something a supervillian would create. Look it up, it’s gross, but it probably has saved your life once a week or so during your lifetime.
Where you don’t have water, you don’t have anything. While there are a lot of pesky little suckers that like to live in water, it’s not the case that they “shouldn’t” be there, you just shouldn’t drink a lot of them. What lets us live in urban cities, arid climates, and have the enormous flexibility we do in the developed world relies largely on the fact that we can turn on a tap and get processed, unnatural, modified, additive filled, water. This is the healthiest water can be, even if you compared it to what you could suck from the clouds.
Next time you think about the arguments against resource processing, processed or modified foods, or any argument that “natural” is better. Think of water.
