Water is a life-sustaining fluid that is essential to health, but if you're drinking straight out of the tap, it can undermine your health in the long run. Yes, tap water isn't always as clean as we might think - chlorine, fluorine compounds, hormones, pesticides and even trace amounts of prescription drugs. You would think this would all get filtered out before, right? At least that's what I used to think...Unfortunately this isn't always the case (the severity of this obviously depends on where you live and how good your city's water supply is). The good news is that you can move the odds in your favour - with the help of a water filter.

There are different types of water filtering options that can drastically improve the quality of your water. Under-the-counters and countertop filters are great because they receive very high marks for filtration, but obviously these are very pricy options that require installation and only make sense if you are living in one place permanently (which clearly isn't the case with me...). So for me the easiest and cheapest solution is a simple water filter.

I've been using a conventional water filter for the last couple of months, so I was very intrigued when Best Water Technology* contacted me to tell me about their uniquely different water filter system. Let me break it down for you:

Conventional water filters reduce carbonate hardness for prevention of lime scale deposits and remove the concentration of heavy metals and chlorine in the water. Read: they clear up all the nasties in your water. This is done with the help of a so called ion exchanger which essentially absorbs all these substances (expect the chlorine) in exchange for hydrogen ions. This is all nice and good, but it leaves the water tasting slightly sour due to a low pH value.

This is where BWT's technology comes in. Not only does it filter out all the bad stuff for you, it also adds in important magnesium ions.

Magnesium

Even if you might get enough magnesium from your food intake (which is very unlikely because non-organic farming soil has virtually no nutrients in it), there are many ways in which magnesium is lost from the body, e.g. alcohol, coffee, black tea, grains, soy, most pharmaceutical drugs, calcium supplements and so forth. Magnesium is important for your health in so so many different ways - better sleep, less headaches and migraines, relaxation of the nervous system, stronger muscles, bone integrity and it can even help to relieve constipation. What I find particularly interesting is that it helps to alkalise the body by rebalancing our pH value. And we all know how important a slightly alkaline pH value is for our health.

A grown women that regularly does sports needs around 310mg of magnesium a day. A full jug of BWT's filtered water contains approximately 65g of magnesium; thats roughly 20% of your daily requirement. And since you should be drinking 2-3 litres MINIMUM a day anyways, you would easily get even more magnesium simply by filtering your water with this new technique.

There's some more awesome side effects..

Environment

Filtering your own water at home means you no longer need to buy plastic bottled water at the supermarket. Which is a huge plus! My father would probably kill me if he read this because he works for Nestlé and I grew up with their bottled water, but let me be blunt: there's simply no good reason to drink bottled water if you live in a country where the tap water is 'safe' to consume according to government officials. According to the EPA bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water and it is also incredibly wasteful. The statistic that shocked me the most is that if we were to line up all plastic water bottles that are discarded per week in the U.S. alone, they would encircle the planet five times. That's so crazy to think about!

The damaging effect of plastic

Plastic isn't just bad for the planet. It’s not good for you, either. Even though water companies increasingly use BPA - free plastic, there are other chemicals that can seep out if the bottles are exposed to heat for too long. Some of those chemicals are known hormone disrupters. I don't know about you, but my hormones are already cray cray as it is (my boyfriend can attest to that), I don't need something more messing with them. So, if you are already filtering your tap water, why not take it one step further and ditch your plastic bottles for a nice glass reusable bottle or a stainless steel thermos.

BWT recently launched in Switzerland and you can now find the water filter exclusively at Migros for CHF 25.80. I'll drink to that! (with a raspberry - mint mix and a lemon, orange, rosemary mix, in case you were wondering)

* in friendly collaboration with BWT