What’s great about this comment is how damn complex just fucking water is.
You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.
Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.
Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.
Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.
And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.
Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.
On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!
And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.
So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.
So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.
So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.
You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.
Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.
Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.
Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.
And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.
Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.
On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!
And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.
So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.
So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.
So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.