[Dove]

I started aggressively filtering my water (Berkey black + white filters) during my last pregnancy, and I was amazed how much better I felt and how much more water I wanted to drink. I was trying very hard to drink lots of water to support the pregnancy, and found it difficult. When I started filtering it, it became really easy and I felt a lot better to boot.

I still get pretty low key dehydrated if I try to subsist on tap water. I suspect my body is balancing my need for water against something in the water it doesn't like. Fluoride is a prime suspect, but any number of other things are possibilities and I wouldn't really have any way to know. But I do often wonder if I'm far from the only one with such an issue, and most people never find it. I didn't for a long time. It is an easy guess for me that if there's something in the water that's bothering you, and you need to dramatically increase your intake to support two people, biological problems and tradeoffs might ensue. And nursing in particular does require an awful lot of water.

I ultimately started filtering all of my water, and it seems like an obvious thing to do in retrospect -- like having a firewall for your home network. It seems silly to me now that I ever assumed that any old pipe sludge that found its way into the system at any point was something I would necessarily want in my body.

[etrautmann]

I'm with you until the fluoride bit. Do you have any medical evidence to suggest there's any issue with fluoride?

Also why Berkey? They're extraordinarily expensive relative to alternatives, primarily for aesthetic gain.

[snapcaster]

I don't know why everyone just accepts uncritically the water fluoridation stuff. It seems like as a culture we're re-examining so many things we incorrectly thought was "safe" but water fluoridation seems to still be a "sacred cow". I'm guessing it's hangover from Birch Society people being against it, but seems weird to just assume it's fine (especially when looking into the somewhat shady origins of the program)

[Spivak]

What shady origins? It was done because because of the horrible state of dental health in the US.

"To join the armed services, men had to have six opposing teeth in their upper and lower jaws; in 1941, almost 10% of recruits were rejected for this reason alone"

Like it doesn't even matter if army recruits is a skewed sample, young men not having 6 pairs of teeth that touch is insane.

"In the early 1950s, two public health researchers stated that on average young men between the ages of 20 and 35 years had already lost an average of 4.2 teeth and that 90% of them were in need of bridges or full or partial dentures."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504307/

The authoritative source of water fluoridation is https://www.york.ac.uk/media/crd/crdreport18.pdf which, broadly concludes that there isn't any strong evidence of harm.

[antisthenes]

> "In the early 1950s, two public health researchers stated that on average young men between the ages of 20 and 35 years had already lost an average of 4.2 teeth and that 90% of them were in need of bridges or full or partial dentures."

Do wisdom teeth count? Because if they do, I am already missing 4 teeth, in addition to 4 more that were taken out to help make space for the rest of my teeth to prevent crowding.

So missing 4.2 teeth on average doesn't actually sound as bad as you make it out.

[KoftaBob]

1. Is it actually "accepted uncritically", or has there just been no meaningful evidence that the risks of water fluoridation outweigh the benefits? If there has been quality research showing the risks outweigh the benefits, care to share? 2. What are the shady origins of the program?

[slenk]

Flouridation has been studied and scuritnized pretty heavily since the 40s. No one is just assuming it's fine. It is.

The positives of flouridation far outweigh any of the negative consequences that could occur. But I have never heard of anyone with a flouride problem in my life.

[nerdponx]

Indeed, I'd sooner ask about chorine/chloramine or any number of dissolved contaminants from pipes and whatever environmental stuff doesn't get filtered out in the water supply. We probably shouldn't be adding fluoride to our water either (questionable medical benefit at best), but as far as things go that my body really doesn't want in it, fluoride is probably not the worst thing in my tap water: https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/system.php?pws=MA3035000

[xupybd]

My wife grew up in Vietnam. No fluoride in her water (she grew up on bottle water). The dental work is expensive and regular.

[sys32768]

We moved to Montana when my child was a teen, and the dentist immediately remarked that my child must have grown up somewhere else because of her teeth being in such good condition.

Most local teens grew up on well water and their teeth suffered for it.

[pkphilip]

There are lots of people with excellent teeth in different parts of the world - and most of them are not using flouridated water. I think the diet does make a difference in dental health

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Countries-with-Endemic-F...

[oifjsidjf]

Many ancient cultures had no flouride and had perfect teeth.

It's the diet, flouride is a bandaid.

Read Weston Price's Nutrition and physical degeneration.

[runnerup]

> and had perfect teeth.

Some support for this, some rebuttal.[0] But yes, diet does seem to be acknowledged as very impactful.

0: https://archive.ph/RWAO9

[valarauko]

Out of curiosity, why would growing up on bottled water lead to terrible dental outcomes? I grew up in India, where the water supply isn't fluoridated, and I didn't see dental health that was significantly worse than the US. We probably got most of our fluoride from ingesting bits of fluoridated toothpaste.

[xupybd]

Yeah it's possible that I'm conflating correlation with causation. But her dentist seems to think it's a factor. They coat her teeth with a fluoride paste and it seems to be working.

On the flip side her late 90s grandmother still has some teeth and walks around unassisted. I don't think any of my grandparents made it to their 80s.

[valarauko]

Tangential anecdote: I had a co-worker in India who grew up in a region with excessive naturally occurring fluoride in the groundwater. As a result, he had blotchy dark brown teeth - not stained, the substructure of the teeth were brown all the way through. The side effect was that the teeth were substantially stronger than regular teeth, as were presumably his bones. My understanding is that extremely high fluoride can mess with bone and tooth development in the embryo, with lower levels only showing up as the cosmetic blotches but no developmental issues.

[techdragon]

The benefits that motivate widespread fluoridation, kick in at concentrations well below those needed to stain teeth. If I recall the history of it all correctly, the level of fluoride needed to stain teeth basically leaves you with teeth that are all but impervious to run of the mill cavities from plaque buildup. The bugs just don’t have the power to degrade tooth enamel containing fluoride minerals at concentrations that are high enough the staining becomes noticeably brown (im talking about an arbitrary colour grade here so please be generous in interpretation of just what I mean by “brown” if performing additional research to refute me)

So basically while we don’t suffer for lack of fluoride to harden our teeth… the extra fluoride gives us a lot of protection. And yes you can have too much fluoride, but your never going to see that kind of medical pathology unless you somehow get a lot more bioavailable fluoride in you in a short span of time than you could possibly get from drinking multiple litres (or even gallons) of fluoridated water per day, they don’t put enough fluoride in the water to turn teeth brown, and we have ample evidence that fluoride bearing spring water above these concentrations does no harm for long periods of time.

I get being concerned, but we got so much more important things to worry about with regard to environmental chemicals than fluoride. It’s pretty easy to read the history, find out about the kids with the brown but perfect teeth, find the other stories from around the world, the second generation families living healthy on spring water that is/was naturally highly fluoridated, and put it all together yourself without need to take anyone’s word for the fact this actually is a pretty good “one weird trick for perfect teeth”.

[steve_adams_86]

I don't know if technologies have changed much in order to change this calculus meaningfully since I last checked, but here's why I like berkey filters:

    1. Although filters are expensive upfront, they last a very long time and are cost-effective as a result
    2. The large containers keep clean water accessible and at hand for things like cooking, and not just drinking
    3. The simple design makes it so, were something to go wrong, I could craft my own filters onto their plumbing once the filters are spent. A ceramic filter would be trivial to make, for example.
    4. Their filters last a long time so I don't need to frequently buy disposable filters and generate more waste. The waste from their filters is also minimal and predominantly biodegradable.
    5. The system is low tech. It'll clean rain water in a pinch with no electricity. I don't need anything special to keep it working.
    6. If the filters slow down, I can clean them to get them working better again. This makes them very versatile for off grid use where the inputs into the system might not be as clean as city water. This would ruin a lot of filters on the market.
    7. The aesthetic gains!

[willcipriano]

Berkey is kind of a scam: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/big-berkey-water-...

> But in our test on chloroform, the Black Berkey filters performed poorly, lowering it by just 13% in our test sample

> New Millennium Concepts, however, claims—right on the box the filters come in—that the Black Berkey filter reduces chloroform by 99.8%, to “below lab detectable limits.”

> However, he said that they stopped meeting the NSF removal standard after approximately 1,100 gallons of filtering—barely more than a third of the 3,000-gallon lifespan New Millennium claims for the Black Berkey filters.

[Dove]

Oh gosh. I didn't mean to touch off a controversy about fluoride. As I said, I suspect, but I don't claim to know. But if you want to know why I suspect, here is my reasoning:

I can subjectively tell good and bad water apart in double blind tests over a period of several hours, so I know that what's happening to me isn't just in my head. So -- I don't know whether it's fluoride or not, but it's definitely something.

The reason to suspect fluoride specifically is that a working Berkey "black" filter still produces "bad" water for me -- the white filter stage seems to be necessary. Twice now, I've had a white filter go bad on me that I didn't realize had happened, felt like crap, tested the water, found tap levels of fluoride, replaced it, and felt much better. The white filters are advertised to get fluoride and arsenic, so that makes it a prime suspect. I don't know exactly what else they might get that the problem might be, but there are a lot of suspects the black filter would block, and it's none of them. So if the problem isn't fluoride, it's something that that fluoride is a good proxy for in this setting.

As the problem I'm trying to fix is low key dehydration (as opposed to avoiding something medical like fluorosis), I don't expect there would be any medical research pointing to fluoride as a culprit. Neither will there be any saying it's safe for my purposes. I have found that while medicine as a field is excellent for healing injuries and saving lives, it's sort of terrible at optimizing health.

What I do know is that I drink a lot more water than is typical -- about two gallons a day when I am not nursing, and much more when I am. I also know that the studies that proscribe fluoride levels in drinking water are ancient, optimized narrowly for dental health, and based on average intake. I know as well that the difference between an effective dose of fluoride and a dose considered potentially dangerous is about an order of magnitude -- right about the difference between my water intake and what is typical. (And as an aside, it blows my mind that we make formula for babies with water like this, dosed based on evidence like that. They don't even have teeth!)

Hence, it's a prime suspect, but even if it turned out to not be that, I would still filter my water very aggressively because something real is definitely happening to me, and that definitely fixes it.

My choice of Berkey is that I want a maximally aggressive solution. I'm not looking to save money. I'm looking to nuke whatever it is that is causing me problems, and am perfectly fine with paying a bit extra to nuke everything. I bought one actually originally concerned about PFCs; discovering the filtered water made me feel much better was an unanticipated happy accident.

[KoftaBob]

> What I do know is that I drink a lot more water than is typical -- about two gallons a day when I am not nursing, and much more when I am

That's 3 times the recommended amount of water intake for pregnant women.

[Dove]

Yes, I don't have a lot of faith in standard recommendations. It's not that I set out to drink that much -- I drink water to solve problems. That's just how much it usually ends up being. The idea of a one size fits all recommendation is something I find laughable. Needs are personal based on activity, environment, and biology.

[chiefalchemist]

What alternatives to Berkey do you suggest?

[seanp2k2]

APEC makes good under-sink and countertop (for e.g. apartments) reverse osmosis systems that will get you to 0ppm TDS.

[etrautmann]

I use a Pur and it’s generally fine.

[pvaldes]

Some worrying Orthorexia vibes in your post. Could mean nothing, but keep an eye on them.

Distilled water is not good to drink. It dehydrates the body, so you could feel the need to drink more. Being devoid of salts can cause also an entire set of undesirable problems if you are pregnant and drink it for too long. The concept of osmosis is very important in biology and disrupt it can cause undesirable effects.

Of course context matters. Heavily filtered water is better than drinking biologically contaminated stuff or water with heavy metals but at long term will hit you.

[nugget]

Your reference to orthorexia is extreme. There's nothing in the parent comment that would take my mind there. It's true that relatively few people realize how polluted drinking water has become - lead and other metals, PFAS, plastic particles - take your pick. I have a hard time understanding why any knowledgable person who can afford to do so wouldn't filter all or almost all of the water that they drink and cook with at home. OP also didn't mention distillation as a filtration method. A reverse osmosis filter with a remineralization stage is vastly more popular and a no brainer to install in any kitchen. If you do drink distilled water then you can supplement with an extra pinch or two per day of salt and minerals in your food and you will be fine.

Orthorexia and OCD tendencies are real and destructive but I'd be equally wary of normalizing the oftentimes highly toxic exposure of modern life to the point where anybody who express tangible concerns and takes meaningful countermeasures is pointed to as a potential basket case.

[Dove]

I appreciate the concern! I actually salinate and mineralize my own water, and agree that it's a necessity. I don't trust the pipes to keep my water clean, and I don't trust the local rocks to mineralize it properly either. I agree this take is unusual, but I don't think it's paranoid. On the contrary, I think it's realistic. Lots of pipes and rocks have documented problems.

Is it Orthorexia to worry about tap water? At least in my case, I don't think so. I'm a very unusual case in a lot of ways, but I'm very sure what I am doing helps me. Looking at broader society? I mean, I know we as a society have problems with chronic and widespread dehydration. I know relentless messaging to people to drink more water doesn't seem to help. I know in my case, the problem certainly wasn't in the motivation, but in the filtering. Maybe I'm weird, but wondering if this is more widespread doesn't seem like an unnatural guess to make, particularly when it comes to a water-heavy activity like nursing. None of this seems paranoid to me. Eccentric, sure, inconvenient, sure, unpopular, sure. But if this is all crazy, I don't see how.

[spoiler]

I had a similar issue of always forcing myself to drink water, not liking it very much and ended up not drinking enough anyway. This lead me to have all sorts of "symptoms" (I was probably bordering being dehydrated). Then I bought a filter jug (Brita) and I love water now.

[blahblah1234567]

On the topic of Water Filters, I recommend ClearlyFiltered-- https://www.clearlyfiltered.com/pages/technology

I bought mine because I saw it filters both Fluoride and Chlorine, as well as approximately 360+ other chemicals

[Dove]

Oh yeah, thanks! I have one of those I was going to try out for travel, and never got around to giving it a serious test.

[tbonesteaks]

Berkey for the win! It has been so useful for my family. During and after pregnancies. If you can get one, I highly recommend it.

[water-your-self]

Out of curiosity, what municipality do you live/ where does your tap water come from?

[jelliclesfarm]

Diet and water intake is very important for new mothers. Soupy foods with less fiber and that are easily digestible also make a big difference. I am going to look up the Flouride part. Thanks for sharing.

[artificialLimbs]

We moved to a place with excellent well water a few years ago. When I drink water in a restaurant now... well, I don't. 99% of the water I've tried in restaurants tastes disgusting.

[boringg]

Can you attach those filters to a faucet or are you required to have a separate device where you put the water?

[DevopsQuestions]

Stop using the white filters, they leech aluminum into the water.