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An Urban Must-Have: The Shower Filter

I grew up on well water. Using a shower filter would have been redundant out in the boonies of rural Minnesota where the water was known for its purity.

However, my parents' attempt to keep the water bill down meant that none of us were encouraged to bathe daily. None of us showered until the teenage years, and baths happened once a week when we were younger.

Perhaps your mother made you take daily baths or showers. Or maybe you're like me, in that your friends in junior high or high school made fun of you when they found out you didn't take a shower every morning.

man taking shower

Not wanting to face the Wrath of Mom or the humiliation of your peers, you forced yourself into the habit of a daily shower. As you grew into adulthood, you began to recognize the advantages of smelling good, namely, you could more easily find a date.

Of course, by then you also understood the importance of personal hygiene. By then you realized that daily showers and baths help to maintain your physical health.

Or do they?

The water from your showerhead may be making you sick

Because of the number of pollutants floating around the environment today, taking a shower could potentially expose you to as many as 100,000 chemical compounds. Even if the tap water in your area had many fewer chemicals than that--say, five hundred--would you be willing to pour that amount of toxic waste over yourself every day?

Yet, unless you have a high-quality shower filter, you pour all manner of poisonous substances over your body every day. The municipal water works can only remove so much of so many pollutants. In fact, in an attempt to kill disease-causing bacteria, it adds one of the most dangerous chemicals of all.

Chlorine: A necessary evil?

In an attempt to sanitize water, Jersey City and Chicago began to add chlorine to its water supplies back in 1908. When waterborne illnesses in these urban areas came to a screeching halt, other U.S. cities were quick to follow their example.

By the middle of the twentieth century, chlorine was being proclaimed as the disinfectant. Very few, if any, living organisms can survive being saturated with the chemical.

The fact that seems to have been ignored is that what holds true for the girl watching goldfish

microscopic organisms holds true for the larger organisms as well. Take fish, for example. If you want to refill their aquarium with unfiltered city tap water, you are told to let the water sit for a day so that the chlorine will evaporate out of it.

Otherwise, the next day, you might find all of your fish floating at the top of the aquarium, belly-up.

What about the larger organisms whom chlorine is supposed to be protecting from the microscopic ones? Can chlorine have a negative effect on human health, as well?

Ask yourself this question: Would you leave an open bottle of bleach sitting on the floor with your nine-month-old child crawling around? No? Why not? Could it be that the EPA itself recognizes chlorine to be a hazard to people and the environment at certain levels of exposure?

Your tap water contains the main ingredient of a WWII Weapon

Unless you already use a shower filter, you are exposing yourself to one of the main ingredients of mustard gas.

Remember mustard gas? Used in the second world war to kill people? The devastating effect was caused by chlorine gas reacting with mucus in the victims' lungs to form hydrochloric acid.

Granted, the chlorine in tap water is between one and three parts per million, a tiny fraction of what is needed to produce the deadly acid. However, let me give you this scenario:

Someone offers you a delicious-looking piece of chocolate cake. "By the way," she says as you push your fork into the moist treat, "I added just a teeny tiny drop of arsenic to the recipe. But you won't notice it, I promise."

Tell me honestly. Would you eat the cake?

Unless you hadn't eaten for a week, you'd probably put the fork down, give the plate back to her and say, "No, thanks."

A little poison is still poison.

Exposure to chlorine, even in miniscule amounts, seems to have a cumulative effect. Women with breast cancer, for example, have 50-60% more chlorine in their breast tissue than healthy women. (Ladies, need I say more to convince you of the need for a shower filter?)

Some other facts to consider:

The EPA has found that the average U.S. household contains elevated levels of chloroform (which can cause anything from headaches to organ damage) because of the chlorine in the shower water.
Tap water contains at least as much chlorine as the recommended dose for swimming pools.
The pores of your skin widen during a shower, causing your skin to absorb more chlorine (and other chemicals) than you would ingest if you drank tap water all day long.
When you inhale the steam from your shower (without a shower filter), you are inhaling concentrated forms of whatever chemicals happen to be in your water.

So, when you take a shower with regular tap water, thanks to chlorine, you will most likely avoid getting typhoid fever.

But your risk of getting cancer may dramatically increase.

How to avoid suffering the ill effects of chlorine in the shower

A state-of-the-art shower filter, whose main purification substance is a carbon block, will remove over 90% of the chlorine, and a high percentage of other chemicals and pollutants, from tap water.

I have been using a Wellness Shower Filter for several years, and love the results. From my teenage years until the day I began using a shower filter, I'd had a dandruff problem. The second day after using the filter, my dandruff miraculously disappeared.

Many people give similar testimonies about the Wellness filter: their skin is softer, no longer itchy. Soap and shampoo rinse right off, so the users no longer have sticky skin or need to use expensive conditioners. And no more chlorine "perfume" that lingers for the first hour or so following a shower.

In other words, the Wellness Shower Filter allows you to bathe in the one element the human body was designed to be bathed in: water. Pure, unadulterated, uncontaminated water.

May I coach you? If you are still without a shower filter, get one. And say "bye-bye" to the poisons lurking in your tap water.

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I recommend drinking only purified water. We now use an under-the-sink reverse osmosis system, but when I was single and living in an apartment (and on a teacher's salary budget!) a portable RO system, like the one below, worked just fine.