Should Singaporeans use water filters? Part 2: Chlorine and other Toxins

Well your body is made up of about 10 trillion cells. About 1 trillion of those cells are your own human cells and the rest, 9 trillion, are mainly friendly bacteria that live in places like your gastrointestinal tract (mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine and colon). These bacteria in our gut ‘microbiome’ do wonderful things like digesting fibre from vegetables and extracting valuable nutrients, helping control our immune systems, keeping us free from diseases and cancers, and even keeping us lean.

So let me ask you this question. If the chlorine in the water supply is strong enough to kill the bacteria in the water supply, is it strong enough to kill the bacteria in our guts? And if it is what are the consequences of that? Let’s have a look at some of the scientific research studies:

So we'll be honest here in that we did not actually read all 275 studies but if you’d like to, feel free to check them all out by following this link. Out of the three highlighted above the first two clearly draw a link between colon cancer and chlorinated water. However the third one found no significant link between chlorinated water and cancer but they did find a link between chlorinated water and gastrointestinal disorders, kidney problems and skin infections so not completely in the clear!

So why could this be the case? How could chlorinated drinking water be responsible for colon cancer? Well it makes quite a bit of sense for two reasons. The first is that in Singapore we follow WHO guidelines which is basically the US. And a lot of these reports come out of the US where they chlorinate their water to a similar degree to Singapore. In the US colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women. However colorectal cancer is now the most common cancer in Singapore affecting both males and females. Singapore is a much hotter country than the US so we consume far more tap water magnifying the problem. 

The second reason requires a bit more understanding about the gut microbiome so this may be new ground for you. The majority of our friendly gut bacteria live in our lower intestine and our colon and they have a number of different jobs. One of those jobs is to sit around in the mucosal lining to prevent any unpleasant organisms entering your body. Technically everything in your gastrointestinal tract is still outside of your body. However if we nuke the friendly bacteria in our gut with chlorine (and antibiotics) then we are wiping out our surface defence team. The Americans call this, “friendly fire” – they’re really good at it too! So without a surface defence team in your colon you have now created a sterile environment perfect for unfriendly bacteria, molds, fungus, parasites and all sorts of toxins in your poo from entering your body and causing inflammation in your colon. Coupled with the fact that most people consume far too much processed food that bungs them up, then the poo is just sitting around festering even longer than it should.

• The first, as we discussed in part 1, is that the WHO seems to selectively ignore certain research reports that tend to show the more detrimental consequences of toxins in our water supply. Presumably this is so as not to be too alarmist to the general population because the cost of removing them completely with reverse osmosis is just way too expensive.
• And secondly each guideline is written on a per toxin basis. So for example looking at arsenic individually and what it does to the body. This is exactly the same as how the allopathic medical community views the human body – as a collection of individual moving parts as opposed to what we really are – a fully integrated and connected organism. So what are the consequences of drinking very tiny amounts of arsenic + very tiny amounts of cyanide + very tiny amounts of lead and 100 other toxins? We just don’t know, so you can either take your health to the casino, roll the dice and see what fate turns up or you can do something about it by thinking about how to remove these toxins from your diet.

To be honest you can’t really escape heavy metals and toxins completely as you’ll even find them in good quality bottled water that comes from mountain springs but at least they won’t have the added toxins such as fluoride or chlorine or any unwelcome compounds created in the industrial process of converting sewage or salt water into drinking water.

Ok so in part 3, next weekend, we’ll be releasing our in depth analysis on the best water filters and we’ll also be ranking different types of water including bottled water, glass bottled water, alkaline water filters, carbon based filters, reverse osmosis and many more. It’s the be all and end all guide on selecting the best water in Singapore so you do not want to miss this.

Enjoy!

The Levitise Team

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