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No cooking? Even, say, boiling potatoes? I always use filtered water if I'm planning to consume it, but I thought I could get away with the sink if I was throwi

• harshreality 8y ago
  I wouldn't worry as much about boiled potatoes as I would something like soaking/cooking grains. It's a matter of your level of concern. I rinse dry goods and and vegetables with tap water, and steam with tap water, but I use expensive water for anything else. Mostly because I don't discard the water. Either the food absorbs all the water, or I accept a mushy, stewy, or soupy consistency. Steaming is better if you're going to use tap water and discard it. With the food out of the water there's less contamination as well as less nutrient loss. Filters are not perfect. Reverse osmosis or distillation is better (in theory). Anyone using a filter should pay attention to what it filters. Some filters don't even claim to filter lead. I think Brita and Pur still have multiple filter types that filter different things, and one type isn't a strict subset of the other.
  • deepsun 8y ago
    After some googling, I concluded that filters in good-tap-water neighborhoods do more harm than good -- they filter out nutrients that we do need from water.
    • taneq 8y ago
      What nutrients does tap water have in it? Fluoride?
      • CodeWriter23 8y ago
        Various minerals and electrolytes such as calcium, magnesium, potassium. I don’t count fluoride as a nutrient.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        All kinds of minerals and such. In fact totally clean water, without them, is harmful and poisonous: "Drinking absolutely pure water can kill you. All the water we normally drink – from taps, from bottles, from the garden hose – contains impurities which affect a property of water called tonicity. This is the ability of a solution to draw or repel water from ajacent solutions when separated by a membrane. Solutions that are hypertonic gain water, while hypotonic solutions lose water. Drinking water, which we usually think of as pure, really contains a whole mess of salts and sugars which make it slightly hypertonic. They also give water its taste. The cytoplasm in the cells of your body also have a tonicity. So, when they are exposed to hypertonic solutions, the cells themselves lose water and shrivel up. When they are in hypotonic solutions, they gain water, swelling up and bursting like a balloon. Absolutely pure water -with no impurities at all – is the most hypotonic solution. So, if you drink enough of it, your cells will start absorbing water. This disturbs the balance of electrolytes (electrically conductive ions) in your body. This is most seriously a problem in the brain, where water poisoning can lead to brain damage, coma and even death."
        • deleted 8y ago
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    • berlinstartup 8y ago
      Either you don't know what the word nutrient means, or you've been bamboozled--water does not/should not contain nutrients.
  • Marsymars 8y ago
    > I rinse dry goods and and vegetables with tap water, and steam with tap water, but I use expensive water for anything else. Mostly because I don't discard the water. Either the food absorbs all the water, or I accept a mushy, stewy, or soupy consistency. I use roughly the same rule of thumb, but I've never been confident about applying it to beans. I often rinse and soak dry beans in bulk. I portion them out and freeze them after cooking, and don't really want to be freezing bean mush. They do absorb a lot of water, but between the rinsing/soaking/cooking process, it's also a lot of expensive water to be pouring out.
• olyjohn 8y ago
  The lady in the article got the infection after using a water filter. This leaves 2 possibilities that I can see. 1. The filter didn't do it's job. I thought that a good filter would filter all organisms (or like 99.9%). I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. 2. The filter does work, but she didn't maintain her filter. Maybe the dirty filter actually was a nice place to cultivate the amoebas? I would be curious if an unchanged filter can actually increase your chance of infection. At best though, the dirty filter wasn't able to filter this organism.
  • scythe 8y ago
    >I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. "Good filter" is a relative term. Maybe you could do it if you "filtered" the water with a $10M reverse osmosis membrane? The filters I buy all say "do not use with unsafe water" or some similar phrase.
    • wtallis 8y ago
      Filters for camping/outdoor usage are less than $100 and most of them are explicitly sold as suitable for use with dirty water. You get a disclaimer that they'll be slower and need to be replaced more often when used on dirty/cloudy water, and sometimes they also advise a chemical or UV treatment be used post-filtering if there are concerns about viruses. Eg. https://www.katadyn.com/us/us/428-8019160-katadyn-gravity-camp-6l_usa https://www.katadyn.com/us/us/428-8019160-katadyn-gravity-ca...
      • mattkrause 8y ago
        There’s a big difference between those and, say, a Britta filter.