Is Chlorine Good for Your Health?

The answer is both yes and no. There is little doubt that adding chlorine to public drinking water supplies to serve as an affordable disinfectant has had the very positive health effect of eliminating a host of water-borne diseases such as cholera. Many people who have become accustomed to drinking tap water even associate the smell of chlorine in their water with it being “safe” to drink. The fact is that chlorine offers health benefits right up to the point where you ingest it. But what then?

The chlorine in treated water is essentially bleach, and it’s unlikely that most people would consider drinking bleach to be good for their health. Medical studies have linked chlorine consumption and associated chlorine byproducts to cancer, heart trouble, premature senility, hardening of the arteries, and a host of other ills. And while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established “safe” levels of chlorine in drinking water supplies, most rational people would prefer to consume none of it. So, what’s the answer?

 

Rather than expect any governmental agency to intervene and change your water treatment process in the near term, individuals can take matters into their own hands and simply begin filtering their drinking water at the point of use. Chlorine is fairly easy to filter out, while at the same time a variety of other potential contaminants that may be present (e.g., cryptosporidium, giardia, MTBE, lead, mercury, arsenic, asbestos, etc.) will be eliminated or significantly reduced as well. The simplest and most cost-effective solution is to filter water through a high quality compressed carbon block filter.

 

Would you like to see a demonstration of how such a filter effectively strips chlorine out of tap water?

 

Then click on the link below to see a short 1-minute video on YouTube.com. Most swimming pool owners are familiar with a chemical solution called OTO that is used to test the concentration of chlorine in pool water – the darker the water color after adding OTO, the more chlorine is present. The video shows a simple OTO test of tap water and a comparison to water drawn from the same source but pushed through a compressed carbon block drinking water filter.