 We never ever think that we're serving our family food that's cooked with contaminated toxic water. I wanna know, what was your big aha moment when it came to understanding the importance of water quality? My big aha moment is when I ran my zip code through the EWG database. What the heck is an EWG? So I'll tell you, it's the Environmental Working Group. And just so everybody knows, their website is ewg.org. And I'm in this business, I'm in the water business and so when I ran my zip code, I live here in Los Angeles and came back with several contaminants that I had no idea were in my water. So I brought them for you today. So I'll run through the list. So first of all in my water I had arsenic at 10 times the health guidelines. And then also, and this one really kind of blew my mind is I had Chromium 6. So Chromium 6 was in my water at 247 times the health guide nut lines. So Erin Brockovich, she made Chromium 6 famous 30 years ago and I saw the Erin Brockovich movie. So to see that Chromium 6 was in my water at 247 times the guidelines. You know, when everyone knows about this contaminant and it's been so well talked about and covered, really, really shocked me. I also had nitrate and nitrates. I had trial-hello-methanes at 171 times the health guidelines. And that's a byproduct of chlorine that they're actually using to pull, you know, parasites and bacteria out of the water. And then when I did further testing, I had prescription drug residue, rocket fuel, P-F-A-S which is these forever chemicals which we're gonna get into today. I mean, I had never really realized that my water had that level of toxicity in it. And as a parent, as a mother and a homemaker, you know, when you start thinking about everything you use tap water for every day and you realize what contaminants during your water, it just was really upsetting to me. And so I'm really glad that I'm gonna be able to share the message about water today and help educate your viewers on this. So let's take a step back. We're assured by our city, county, state, whatever that there are quality assurance that your tap water meets government requirements. It's safe to drink. And the idea that we should be worried about all these other things is just a bunch of hooey because I hear this all the time. The government is not making sure that your water is safe to drink. It may leave the water facility clean and free from bacteria and parasites but on the journey to our houses, through our infrastructure that is where really a lot of the contamination happens. And so, you know, the municipalities are doing the best they can in the water treatment facilities but even some of the things that they're using to make sure that the water's potable are really not great for anyone's health. Gotcha. Man, I guess we'll get into this but that doesn't even include things like the amount of chlorine in water, the amount of fluoride in water. The environmental working group, I talk about in all my books and I send people to there and you guys really should look at your own community and you can just type in the zip code and it will usually come up. And that's a great place to start. It's a great resource because it also shows you different ways you can purify your water and what you need as a consumer to remove contaminants that you might be worried about. Another thing about the government is that, you know, water and water issues are really, really complex. And so, several large corporations, they don't want to be liable for some of the things that they're doing that are actually contaminating our water. And so when politicians run and you know, special interest groups really make it so we don't regulate our standards well enough. So we haven't regulated our health standards for over 20 years. So that's really alarming and what they do is they play with the health standards and then the water standards to keep them if water standards are above the health standards then these companies can continue to not be liable for what they're putting into our water supply. So even 30 years after Aaron Brockovich, we still have these contaminants in our water. And I mean, it's coming out of your tap. Yeah. 247 times the health guidelines. And Aaron Brockovich is still passionately talking about this. So everybody knows about it. The thing is, is that there's really no affordable way for our governments to really provide pure, clean, non-toxic water. It's just unaffordable. And so the EPA doesn't want to get into a situation where they can't deliver tap water. True. Yeah. These are the bare minimum standards that, you know, we'll guarantee you that they're not going to be enough bacteria in this water that's going to kill you by drinking it. Exactly. Except in Flint, Michigan, but that's another story. And that's really what the government is trying to do, right? Yeah. They're trying to keep it safe to a point. So it's potable and it's not going to transmit viruses or bacteria for illness. But the infrastructure is really where the contamination happens. And we'll talk about that a little bit today. All right. Well, what about bottled water? For instance, I rave about San Pellegrino in a glass bottle. I'm beginning to see it in plastic bottles, which bothers me. But I always, I actually am a big fan of them. I have no interest. So that's what I drink as a bottled water at home. What about bottled water? I enjoy bottled water too. And I love San Pellegrino. Well, first, I think it's really important we talk about the environment. And bottled water here in the United States, there are over 80 billion water bottles, plastic water bottles sold every single year. And 38 billion of those water bottles end up in plastic landfills. So as a parent and as a mother, as someone who's really concerned about the environment and what we leave behind for our kids, that's really, really important to me. It should be important to everybody. And then another thing that's really, really tragic is that over a million marine life species die every single year from plastic contaminating our oceans. And so just from an environmental standpoint, nobody should be using plastic water bottles. In addition to that, canned water, canned water can be lined with plastic. And so anything that has any sort of BPA in it can really leech into the water that you're drinking and cause some health issues. And this plastic has phthalates in it. And when phthalates leech into your water, a lot of people are very sensitive to this. And what phthalates do is they're endocrine disruptors. And of course, Dr. Gundry, you know about endocrine disruption. And that can have a lot of wreak havoc on women's hormones and create many, many health issues for several people. Yeah, it actually has dramatic effects on the developing brain. And in my upcoming book, it turns out that microplastics, which are microscopic particles of plastics, which we now are eating in our animals, in our fish, dramatically disturb the microbiome. I mean, who knew? Just these little micro nothings are completely changing our microbiome, for the worst, folks, for the worst. And yet we're using these all the time. Is there any safe plastic commercial water bottle that you can buy? No. All right. There's really not. If for plastic water, if you're putting it into a takeaway bottle, like a Triton plastic or something like that, that's used for multi-use, that's really the type of plastic that I think that is safe to use if you have to. I really prefer glass bottles and bottling your own water at home with a multi-stage reverse osmosis water system. That's the safest way to go. So what's a Triton plastic? How would anybody know? I want Triton plastic, please. Like for instance, Aquachu, our company, that our reverse osmosis system, our water catch is made from Triton plastic. So it's kind of the gold standard in plastic that doesn't leach. And bottles should be marked with a Triton plastic symbol and you could look on websites to see what type of plastic they're made of. Is it usually underneath? Yes, underneath the bottle. Okay. And let me address the elephant in the room. Everybody hopefully knows about BPA. Yeah. And then that it's finally been banned but it's replacements like BPS and one down the line. We're finding out that those are no safer, maybe worse than BPA. Yes. And yet we may see no BPA assuming that, oh good, we're fine now. And that's just not the case. Really the safest way to go is to drink your water out of a glass container. Any sort of plastic isn't really a good idea. Okay. All right. And you mentioned these PFAs, forever chemicals. And these are well-named forever chemicals because we still have no idea how long these things are gonna last or how we're gonna get rid of them. And these are also all endocrine disruptors. Yes, these forever chemicals, PFAs and then PFOS, they come from things that we use every day. So they're in our curtains, they're in fabric, they're in many detergents. They're also used as fire retardant. They spray runways with this for fire retardant purposes and different military bases across the US and most contaminants break down over time. But these forever chemicals, they last forever and they never, ever, ever break down. So there's no way to get rid of them. It's really, really scary. And just recently, a really major orange juice brand, they found forever chemicals in this orange juice. So they're really starting to get into our food and water supply and it's really, really a big problem. The best way to make sure and have peace of mind that you don't have forever chemicals in your water is to run them through a reverse osmosis water system. And that will get rid of them. That will get rid of them, yes. Okay, all right. See, I told you, you're not supposed to drink orange juice. Another reason, thank you for bringing that up. You're welcome. How would people know that they're drinking contaminants in their water? I mean, come on, again, let me back up. The EPA was supposed to protect us, right? The Environmental Protection Agency, that's the whole idea. Now I know that they have been defanged by previous administrations. And one of the things that's been fascinating to me is that the EPA knows about these endocrine disrupting chemicals. They know they exist. Their argument has been, yes, these are endocrine disrupting chemicals, but they are in such minute amounts that it would be impossible for it to have an effect on our endocrine system. As I've written about in my books, what they didn't know, most of us didn't know, is these don't act like normal hormones. They actually can hit a hormone receptor. Normal hormones hit a receptor, give its message, and then leave. These hit the hormone receptor, lock on and never leave. So it's pushing the button constantly. And so you can have minute amounts that would seem to be totally non-bothersome, but because they constantly are stuck to these receptors, they act as if you're swallowing gallons of estrogen or progesterone. And there's, at the moment, no way to convince the government that this is actually happening, except when what we observe in animal studies. Yeah, so I mean, I think there are several symptoms that people can get. Like if you constantly have fatigue, headaches, digestive issues, things like that, if you have differences in your cholesterol or blood pressure, these are all key things to really look at your environment and start trying to remove some of the toxins in your life. And so some of these are very common health concerns. Like, oh, I have a headache. If you have it repeatedly, then it's something to really think about, making your environment a little less toxic. And the number one thing people can do to make sure that they're freeing themselves from unnecessary toxins is to drink purified water. But wait a minute now. I want chlorine in my water because I don't want any bacteria and viruses. What's the difference between chlorine and chloramines? They're not the same, right? No, they're not the same. So chlorine is chlorine and it's used to remove bacteria and parasites from water. And then there's also chloramines. So chloramines is a combination of chlorine and ammonia. So and chloramines is the most preferred chemical that they use to clean water in the water treatment facilities. And chloramine is really, really, really hard to remove from your water. And one of the real only ways to remove chloramine is through a multi-stage reverse osmosis system. And the reason that we don't want to ingest chlorine chloramines or a byproduct of chlorine and chloramines, which is trihalomethanes, is because they wreak havoc on our gut health. So chloramines, this is very interesting, Dr. Gendry, chloramines actually will eat through copper piping. So when you think that chloramine, a chemical that they're putting in our water to clean it, is actually chewing through copper piping, it's really alarming. So you can just imagine what it's doing to our gut. I'm hearing that cities and governments are trying to deliver to you at your spigot, a water that is at least not going to kill you from bacteria viruses, and that was their purpose. But it's now up to you to get all of these things that they put in there to make sure that this stuff isn't gonna kill you. Get rid of these things that are probably gonna kill you long-term. Right, exactly. All right, so let's talk about that. What are the actionable steps that people can do? Sure, so I think what's really important is that the big misconception about purified water is people think that if they're drinking purified water and bottled water, they're okay. But the main thing is, and this is really important, if your listeners hear one thing today, please listen to this. Contaminants do not boil out. So when you're cooking and you're making tea and you're making your coffee in the morning, or you're making mac and cheese, or you're making pasta, boiling noodles, all the things that you do daily, contaminants do not boil out. And so it's really important that not only the water that you drink, but what you're using to cook with is purified water. And so some steps that listeners can do is to make sure that they're using either bottled water or they run their water through some sort of reverse osmosis machine that they cook with to make sure that they're starting with pure water. You know, years ago, actually, kind of right after Tiananmen Square in China was doing mission work in China, operating in Beijing. And we stayed at the hotel then and actually had our young kids with us. And we would pick up boiled water from a station on the floor and carry it back to our room. But they also, kiddo not, gave us beer that we had to brush our teeth with because they didn't even want us drinking their boiled water. And I thought, like, kids, you know, brush their teeth with beer. They never forgotten that. That's a great story. Yeah, it's true. So they didn't even trust their boiled water for us to drink. So you're right. They couldn't get the contaminants. Yeah, contaminants do not boil out. And it's just not commonly known. We go through our day, we turn on our faucet, we fill up our pots, we make our coffee, we make our tea, and we never ever think that we're serving our family food that's cooked with contaminated toxic water. Just think about when you're steaming your vegetables and you're thinking you're being healthy, you go, you buy your organic vegetables at the farmer's market, you put them in your steamer, you put some water in and you're actually undoing all the good you're trying to do because you're just steaming them in toxic water. So I find it like most people just don't have that understanding that when they cook, you really have to do it with purified water. I'm gonna be safe and I'm gonna drink bottled water and I'm gonna boil the water for my coffee and I'm gonna boil the water for my tea or I'm gonna boil my vegetables. We don't think that- No. Yeah. During it. Yeah. All right, so there's lots of water filters, pitchers that we see on the market that we see in stores. Walk us through this maze. Sure, so there are several different water filtration possibilities that they have out there. So the most common type of water filter, they're pitcher filters and you see them everywhere, you could pick them up at the store and pitcher filters, how they work is their gravity fed. So water passes through a loose carbon filter. It removes some simple contaminants like chlorine. And so really pitcher filters are used to make our water taste a little bit better. And so, but they're not really meant to remove large levels of contaminants. And then you also have fridge filters and you have faucet filters. Now, fridge and faucet filters are marginally better than pitcher filters. And the reason why they're better is they use pressure to push water through a carbon block filter. So it removes a little bit more contaminants, but generally they don't remove contaminants like chromium or lead or forever chemicals or things like that. And the thing with any type of pitcher filter, fridge filter or faucet filter is that you really need to be on top of your filter changes and they don't notify you when it's time to change your filter. So I don't know if you're like me, but I barely can keep up with my appointments, my children, my husband, what I have going on every day, let alone monitor how many gallons of water I'm drinking. And then, you know, as we've spoken about today, pitcher filters, they're not a really good option because you have to cook, you know? And so you have to fill up a pitcher every time you go to cook and most of the contaminants aren't coming out of that pitcher filter system anyway. So really the best type of water filtration system is a multi-stage reverse osmosis system. So your water goes through several different stages of filtration to get purified. I think a lot of people have heard about reverse osmosis. A lot of the big companies that sell water use that system, right? Yes, they do. Most bottled water that you drink is reverse osmosis water. We've come to accept and it sounds like you're saying, if you're gonna have bottled water, you want a reverse osmosis system that put it in there. Yes, reverse osmosis is a gold standard in water purification. And if you want, I can tell people what reverse osmosis means. Please. Okay, so reverse osmosis is magic, really. But seriously, it's a very, very scientific process. We learned about osmosis in high school and if you were like me, you really didn't understand what they were talking about but luckily I work with a lot of great scientists who have kind of broken this down for me. So what osmosis means is that when you have a living cell, it passes through a membrane and things pass through that membrane from a higher concentration to a lower concentration. And reverse osmosis is the reverse of that. So what happens with reverse osmosis is that through pressure, water is passed through the membrane and the contaminated water stays on one side and clean, pure water is left on the other. So once it passes through, you have clean, pure water. And what do they do with the rest, just? So with our AquaTrue multi-stage reverse osmosis system, it leaves a small percent of the water, like 10% of the water in the tank. And so first of all, that shouldn't be used for anything like you shouldn't cook with it, you shouldn't give it to your animals. That's highly contaminated water. We say sometimes if you have a shrub or something, you can use it to water your shrubs, but nowhere near vegetables that you might want to consume. But typically I just recommend to use it for your indoor plants. So we know that reverse osmosis is the gold standard. Why then do we have all these water filtration appliances in our homes that don't use that? Is it cost? Is it inconvenient? Is it plumbing? Take us through the steps. Well, absolutely. A lot of it is plumbing and a multi-stage reverse osmosis system it has to pass through four different levels of filtration. Carbon filters, it's a good way to pull out some of the chlorine and chloramines that add bad taste. So I think most water filters that like pitcher, sink and fridge, they're there to make the water taste better and remove the chlorine taste from water. But they don't truly purify the water. So tell us about AquaTrue. I mean, why did you guys say the current system isn't going to get the contaminants that we should be really worried about? We gotta go to a reverse osmosis system. When you think about the different types of pollutants that are in the water that are not being removed by your pitcher filters and your fridge filters, they're really significant contaminants. So lead, for instance, lead is in our infrastructure. And so, you know, the water ways, water travels through lead pipes to get to our homes and lead can cause permanent brain damage, most seriously in children. And that's what happened in Flint, Michigan. I mean, up until just recently, and they're starting to change it now, fluoride. Fluoride's been added to water to help prevent cavities, which is kind of ludicrous if you think about it, because you're drinking water, it's not sitting on your teeth, you know? And a lot of fluoride has been shown to cause major severe toxicity in children. And so now they're making changes and they're removing fluoride from water. And then also arsenic causes cancer, chromium-sick causes cancer. Chlorine, chloramine destroys gut health and bacteria. So Peter Spiegel, the founder of Aquatune, who's a really, really good friend of mine, felt really compelled to make affordable, easy solutions for people to get clean, pure water into their homes so they can drink it, they can cook with it. And they don't need to, you know, incur the expense of putting a whole house reverse osmosis system in their home, because whole house reverse osmosis systems are very, very expensive. So we really wanted to make something very affordable for everybody that meets any family's needs. And so that was the impetus, huh? Yeah, that was the impetus. Now, can you do a countertop model? I'll talk to you a little bit about our different Aquatru models and how they work. So we have different models for different size households. So we just launched a great model. It's called the Aquatru carafe. And Aquatru carafe is for households with like one or two people. If you have an apartment, something like that, it doesn't need to be plumbed. So it sits right on your countertop, like a coffee machine. And you basically put your water in the back and clean water comes into a glass pitcher. And you have a half gallon glass pitcher of water that you can use for either cooking or drinking water. And it's really, really easy. All of our reverse osmosis systems, they have the same types of filters. So no matter what Aquatru product you end up with your household, they all go through the same filter process. So the first stage of our filter process is the pre-filter. And our pre-filter removes large particles like sediment and rust. Our stage two filter is our carbon filter. Our carbon filter removes chlorine and chloramines. And that's what makes your water taste really good is by removing those contaminants from the water and also protecting your gut health. And then there's stage three. Stage three is the reverse osmosis membrane. So our RO membrane removes inorganic chemicals like lead, fluoride, chromium-6, arsenic, uranium. And lastly, we have our stage four filter. So that's our coconut block filter and it removes organic compounds like forever chemicals, prescription drug residue, antibiotics, rocket fuel, birth control, all these horrible things that are getting into the water. So as you can see, it's a pretty sophisticated process and filtration process that the water goes through. So we have our carafe unit that's for smaller homes. We also have a bigger unit called our classic countertop unit that goes right on the counter. It's for larger households and it requires no plumbing. You just put water in the back and clean water comes through the front. And additionally, we have an undersink unit and that is for larger households with big families. So we really have options for everybody. So is this like literally brewing a pot of coffee in the morning in terms of how easy it is? Oh, it's so easy. So you literally take the back section of the aqua chew, you fill it up with your tap water, you set it back, you turn it on, it goes through the four stage reverse osmosis process and clean water comes in the front. So you have your drink water in the front of the machine, you have your disposable water in the back of the machine and you also have lights that show you on the units are lit up and they show you what process of filtration it's going through and also when it's time to change your filters. And that's really important because filter changing is key. And we really wanted to make it so easy for people to understand this. So our filter life, one of our filters you change every six months. Another filter you change every year. And then we have a third filter which you change every two years. So our filter life is very, very long and the machines are really, really simple to you. Well, isn't that one of the big misconceptions about affordable water filtration systems that you don't, it sounds pretty reasonable until you realize that the filters don't last very long and you're kind of constantly buying new filters if you should buy new filters because they really don't last very long. So something that looks like a bargain isn't a bargain. Yeah, so this is really interesting and we should probably talk about NSF certification because filter life and a lot of these smaller type water pitchers and fridge filters and that sort of thing. You really wanna make sure that your water purification system is certified to the life of the filters to NSF standards. And what that means is that the contaminants that they claim to remove will be removed for the life of the filters. And so typically some of these filter lives are very short and that's why in AquaTru we made sure that the filters, you're removing all of the contaminants for the life of the filter. What's an NSF? It's the National Sanitation Foundation. Oh, okay. And they certified NSF standards are a governing body that actually creates standards that companies need to hit to get certifications sort of like USDA certified organic. And that's something you really wanna look for when you're looking at water purifiers that they're certified to NSF standards. And that really like AquaTru is certified to remove 83 contaminants for the life cycle of their filters. And so when you're looking for water purifiers, when you go to the water purification website they'll have performance data sheets and the certifying body's name will be on that performance data sheet where it lists all the contaminants that the water purifier is certified to remove. There's a lot of companies that don't necessarily have third party testing and that aren't certified to NSF standards. So it's really important. That's really, really important in water purification. You've scared us all to death but you've given us action items. Let me ask you a dumb question. Are there places in this country, are there cities where the water is actually pretty safe to drink out of the tap? My answer is no. No one should be drinking water out of the tap because it's been treated with chlorine and chloramines that really aren't good for us or our gut health. Everyone should be purifying their water through some sort of multi-stage reverse osmosis system to make sure that they're pulling out all of those contaminants. All right, good answer. You're definitely gonna want to see this one. Even though it's not like you're chewing on metal, you're ingesting metal flakes with every bite or worse flakes of whatever coating you have on your pan.