 The first question to ask is, are humans meant to drink water? There is certainly variance among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Some African tribes might have only had water from a melon once a week, yet the first nation Alaskans drank large amounts of water every single day from melted snow. The main consideration here is that there are many modern factors resulting in our bodies needing a lot more water than our past ancestors. Mainly because of increased antioxidant requirements and pollutants in the environment. There are two components to water, chemical and physical. Chemical includes herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, birth control, things that are difficult if not impossible to remove in some cases. The physical components pertain to parts per million, measured in total dissolved solids. The main concerns here are halogens like fluoride and chlorine that we spoke about last week, as well as things like lead and copper. Fortunately, the physical components are a lot easier to remove. I actually received a letter from my water company once every two or three months saying that the chlorine levels are too high. These people will literally poison you, tell you about it and no one seems to care. It is a grading scale for parts per million. The average tap water is 170 to 400 parts per million, but lower is not always better. New York City water has a very low parts per million, but a high antibiotic, chemical and hormone content, yet people think that New York City water tastes good. You could, on the contrary, have a very high mineral water that has a perfect mineral profile or it could be entirely lead. People also bring up the pH of water frequently, how acidic or alkaline the water is, but the body regulates its pH regardless of what you're drinking. So any choices on the alkalinity of your water should be based on personal taste preference as it's not going to make a difference on your body. Just so we don't overcomplicate things, there are three solutions to making your water safe. The first one is that you can use a reverse osmosis or distillation filter. Distillation is boiling the water into a vapor and then collecting it, usually passing it through additional filtration, whereas reverse osmosis is putting the water through carbon and fluoride filtration. Distillation is usually better in most cases, except it costs thousands and thousands of dollars or as reverse osmosis is fairly affordable. The second option is to purchase glass bottled mineral water. This is more of a temporary solution as it gets very expensive over time. It's more like how do you feel for two or three weeks drinking a new water source? If it's better, then you know you want to get a filter or a more affordable solution for your water. And glass bottled because we know that there are issues with plastic and even then you'd still want to test the glass bottled water you're drinking to make sure you're not wasting your efforts. The third option is to go to a local well or a spring and fill up some containers. There's a website findaspring.com but that's not really practical for most people. And of course there are people that live in certain parts of the world who have the luxury of drinking pure water. Either way you want to test your water with at least a chlorine and a fluoride kit after you filter it, maybe even before you filter it to see how effective the filter is and maybe even do a mineral analysis on your water if you have a natural spring water source. So let's take a look at the filter that I have. This is my reverse osmosis filter from Apex Water. I got it on Amazon for around $200 and then I had a plumber install it. We have the sediment filter down here. We have two carbon filters and then we have the fluoride filter and the deodorizer. Sediments removes like grease and hair and stuff. The carbon filters remove almost all of the parts per million. We're really getting down to single digits here. Of course the fluoride removes the fluoride and then the deodorizer makes the water taste normal after passing through the filters. The water is stored in the tank over here. Usually spend about $100 a year to replace the filters. And then we have the faucet up here. This actually comes with a pretty flimsy plastic faucet so I bought this one. It's much nicer and easier to use. All this stuff is on Amazon and now I have reverse osmosis water, easy to access whenever I want. If you remember that parts per million chart we looked at earlier, reverse osmosis distillation and all of these filtration systems were very low parts per million on the list to an unnatural extent. So do we have to add minerals back into the water? I did a video on electrolytes the other week and I don't think electrolyte powders are a solution. Salt can be added to the water and that does help people in some cases. But most people prefer to just add extra salt to their food. However, I definitely have some suggestions that I have explored over the past few years. The three main ones are clay, seaweed, and diatomaceous earth. There are four primary types of clay, Calvin, illite, montmorillonite smectite, bentonite clay being a derivative of montmorillonite smectite and then you have chloride which isn't really the same as clay but it's categorized as clay. Clay has small amounts of trace minerals. I believe it can also have gut microbiome benefits because we can assume that there are microbes in the soil in the clay that we are consuming and it can even help with leaky gut. The tiny clay particles can kind of fill in the gaps in the small intestine especially if you drink the clay before a meal. I have two types of clay. One is the first clay we talked about, Calvin clay, K-A-O-L-I-N. This is found predominantly in Africa as well as parts of Asia. This isn't the one I usually use but it's the same purpose of illite clay, I-L-L-I-T-E. This is actually an Italian clay. This occurs in Europe as well as some other parts of the world, I think the Americas. And what I try to do is source clay or soil from my ancestry. So I'm Italian so I thought Italian clay would be perfect, get the microbes that maybe my ancestors would have had but the main purpose here is trace mineral content. All clay has a pretty consistent mineral content across the board but you do want to avoid bentonite or volcanic clays as they can be high in heavy metals. It's mostly silica, then you have aluminum. Silica and aluminum compose most of the earth's crust and then you have all the other trace minerals. Calcium is actually pretty high in here. We have magnesium at 5% which is pretty good, some sodium, some potassium but the point is trace minerals, beneficial microbes and you know our soils are depleted now so by consuming soil we are probably getting some minerals that we need to have and then there is a lot of evidence of geophagia which is our indigenous ancestors and these hunter-gatherer people actually consuming dirt and soil on its own. We've seen that in many cultures and many tribes. So the second thing I mentioned was seaweed and seaweed is by far the best mineral supplement so if you're having electrolyte issues and you consume seaweed and you don't feel better it's not electrolytes because the amount of potassium, magnesium and calcium in seaweed is unparalleled and it's in a natural bioavailable form. This is kombu from Maine Coast Sea Vegetables. You want raw seaweed and I think dulls and kombu have the best mineral ratios. Don't just go and get any seaweed because there is a huge variance in the amount of minerals. I mean seaweed is probably the healthiest plant food in general. It has iodine, it has so many minerals, so many elements, it's so good for you. All of the stuff guys is on my Amazon shop in the water section if you don't have access to it and the third thing is diatomaceous earth. This is actually from decomposed shellfish and ocean life. I have heard this is high in heavy metals and this is actually used to kill ants but to my understanding this is simply very similar to clay, however there might be some heavy metal concern and also it seems like a pretty unnatural thing to be consuming every day so I wouldn't use diatomaceous earth as a mineral supplement until more research and more experiments have been done. I tried to find what the mineral profile of this was or what it actually was from like a chemical standpoint and I couldn't figure it out so maybe my opinion on that will change when I do have access to that information. So as with salt, water is pretty anecdotal. Some people need more, some people need less, some people need to add things to their water, some people don't. Either way, you never want to force your body to do something it doesn't want to do. Thank you guys for joining me. If you could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon, share the video if you can. If you guys want to support me further definitely check out Frankie's Pre-Range Meat. We recently added 100% grass-fed Wagyu. No one else has it. Check it out. I've also made a new tooth powder formula for Frankie's Naturals, a remineralizing tooth powder with magnesium and a bunch of other stuff. Go to frankiesnaturals.com to check that out. If you guys do want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations I do help people with water as part of the consultation. Send me an email frankataphano at gmail.com. Thanks again for joining me guys. As I said, check out my Amazon shop if you have questions about anything you've seen in this video.