Humans have really been able to propel progress in recent history, but sometimes our progress comes at a cost to ourselves. It's like we're using a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach. We generate exciting ideas, dive in headfirst, and only course-correct if things go wrong—great for innovation, but not so great for us, the guinea pigs.

Did you know that in 1946, the city of San Antonio, Texas sprayed the entire city with DDT, a pesticide, in an attempt to stop the spread of polio? This, to me, is mind-blowingly stupid and a great representation of humans being arrogant and again, very stupid. DDT was officially banned in 1972.

One of the sad parts about living in the US is that one would just assume that because we live in a modern, industrialized society, clean water should be automatic. Nothing’s automatic anymore.

It’s weird feeling like you have to educate yourself more, spend more money, and go out of your way just to live a cleaner/healthier lifestyle.

I don’t know if it’s defeating or empowering, but it's definitely confusing.

Today we're going to discuss how the widespread contamination of tap water can create numerous issues like hormonal imbalances that disrupt fat loss

Water treatment plants aren’t able to effectively remove all the contaminants and most people are not properly filtering their water which can contribute to many issues - fat accumulation being an indirect cause. Remember, humans do dumb things at a cost to ourselves.

The water in the US is heavily contaminated and is a significant contributor to hormone issues.

Today you’re going to learn:

• What Contaminants Are Found in Tap Water
• How Those Contaminants Affect Our Bodies
• The Best Ways to Filter Water

Also, if anything I say in this post sounds crazy to you, remember that San Antonio sprayed their entire city with DDT.

What Contaminants Are Found in Tap Water and How They Interact with Our Bodies

You might want to think twice before taking your next sip. Tap water can contain a surprising variety of contaminants including heavy metals like lead and mercury, pharmaceutical drugs, forever chemicals, and pesticides.

Below are some of the specific contaminants that are found in our tap water supply

• Hormones, particularly estrogens - estrone (E1), estradiol (E2), estriol (E3)
• Birth control - ethinyl estradiol (EE2)
• Heavy metals like lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury
• Sodium fluoride
• PFAS or forever chemicals
• Pesticides and herbicides

Hormones and Birth Control

When people take birth control pills, they excrete some of the hormones in their urine. This urine is then flushed down the toilet and ends up at the wastewater treatment plant.

Wastewater treatment plants are designed to remove contaminants from wastewater so that it can be safely discharged back into the environment. However, they’re not able to remove all contaminants, including hormones. As a result, some hormones can unfortunately remain in the water, though typically a low amount.

Here are a handful of ways hormones end up in your drinking water:

• Hormone medications are sometimes improperly dumped or leak out of pharmaceutical factories, letting them into nearby water.
• Livestock farms can have runoff containing hormones like estradiol from all the animal urine and fecal matter that gets washed into water supplies when it rains.
• Landfills can leak chemicals like estrogens from all the disposed medications, plastics, and waste they contain into groundwater.

How Exogenous Hormones Affect Our Bodies

Most of the chemicals and contaminants found in our tap water are estrogenic. This is an oversimplified way of saying they can increase estrogen in our bodies. Excess estrogen can promote fat accumulation, especially around the abdomen and thighs. This is because estrogen can increase the number of fat cells in the body and make it more difficult to burn fat.

Since estrogen is a growth factor, this means that it can stimulate cell growth and division. This is great if we have a wound, like a cut, since it helps in all phases of wound healing. But this can be less than ideal if we don’t really have a wound ➡️ cancer.

Heavy Metals

Heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic can wind up in your tap water through a variety of different ways.

• Old lead pipes that bring water into homes can corrode and leak lead into the water. Lots of cities, particularly older ones, still have these old lead service lines that need replacing.
• Factories dumping wastewater with metals into lakes and rivers that supply drinking water.
• Mine drainage and waste rock from metal mines polluting nearby ground and surface water.
• Landfill leaks releasing heavy metals from thrown out batteries, electronics, paint cans and more into groundwater.
• Natural deposits of some metals like arsenic in soil and rock getting dissolved in ground and surface waters.
• Metals in fertilizers and animal waste on big industrial farms running off into rivers and streams when it rains.
• Small amounts of metals getting into waste water from food, products, medicines, and improper treatment letting them into drinking water supplies.

How Heavy Metals Affect Our Bodies

Heavy metals are highly toxic to humans and exposure to these should be avoided as much as possible.

• Lead: Lead is a highly toxic metal that can damage the nervous system, kidneys, and liver. It’s especially harmful to children, since it can interfere with brain development.
• Arsenic: Arsenic is a known carcinogen that can also cause damage to the skin, lungs, and bladder.
• Cadmium: Cadmium is a toxic metal that can damage the kidneys, bones, and lungs. It can enter tap water from industrial pollution and from mining operations.
• Mercury: Mercury is a highly toxic metal that can damage the nervous system, kidneys, and liver. It can enter tap water from industrial pollution like coal-fired power plants.

PFAS

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are industrial chemicals that can pollute drinking water in a variety of different ways:

• Industrial wastewater discharges into surface waters
• Leaching from landfills into groundwater
• Use of PFAS-containing firefighting foams with runoff into nearby waters
• Land application of sewage sludge containing PFAS
• Release from discarded PFAS-containing consumer products like nonstick cookware, water-resistant fabrics, and stain repellents
• One study even found that up to 35% of PFAS in wastewater came from toilet paper.

How PFAS Affect Our Bodies

There is still a lot to learn about PFAS, but we do know that they’re fat soluble. This means that they can dissolve in fat and other oily substances. This is why PFAS can accumulate in the body, especially in tissues with high fat content, such as our fat cells, the liver, kidneys, and blood. PFAS have been linked to numerous hormone issues.

• Estrogen: They can bind to estrogen receptors which can potentially lead to issues like early puberty, irregular periods, infertility and weight gain.
• Testosterone: PFAS can reduce testosterone levels. which can decrease libido, contribute to ED, impair fertility, and increase fat accumulation.
• Thyroid: PFAS can interfere with thyroid hormones that control your metabolism. That disruption can cause thyroid disease, weight gain, and abnormal growth.
• Cortisol: They can increase cortisol, your main stress hormone. More cortisol leads to increased anxiety, depression, fat accumulation around the midsection, and can also further impair testosterone and thyroid activity.

Sodium Fluoride

It’s common knowledge that our water supply in the US is proactively treated with sodium fluoride to “protect the enamel in our teeth,” so we won’t get cavities. This initially started in 1945.

• Here’s a study that shows that too much fluoride can actually damage our teeth: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200218143719.htm
• Here’s another article on a study that linked pregnant mothers drinking fluoridated water to lower IQ levels in children: https://www.science.org/content/article/drinking-fluoridated-water-during-pregnancy-may-lower-iq-sons-controversial-study-says

How Sodium Fluoride Affect Our Bodies

Though most people think sodium fluoride is a benign compound, I would argue that it's not as beneficial as we're lead to believe:

• Iodine is crucial for production of thyroid hormones and fluoride can prevent the absorption of iodine in the GI tract. In some cases, this can contribute to hypothyroidism or a sluggish thyroid, where the thyroid doesn't make enough hormones for normal metabolic function.
• Fluoride also directly inhibits a specific enzyme (thyroid peroxidase) needed to build the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. By inhibiting this enzyme, fluoride reduces synthesis of these essential hormones. Impaired production of T3 and T4 will lead to a slower metabolic rate.
• For thyroid hormones to properly work, they have to bind to specific receptor sites on cells. Fluoride can block thyroid hormones from these receptors, meaning the thyroid hormones can't activate their receptors properly. This can disrupt normal metabolic signaling.
• All three of these things can contribute to a slower metabolic rate. But the problem here is that this is just one piece of the thyroid puzzle. Read my other post on the thyroid if you’re interested in learning about other ways thyroid activity can become impaired.

Also, if we’re thinking critically about the negative effects of fluoride on thyroid activity, it would make sense that moms drinking fluoridated water might have impaired thyroid activity. This impaired thyroid activity could potentially lead to lower IQ levels in children, since thyroid hormone is essential for brain development. This is one of the reasons why endocrinologists often times increase thyroid medication dosage during the pregnancies of women who are hypothyroid.

Pesticides

Pesticides sprayed or spread onto farms, lawns, and gardens can seep into sources of drinking water. Runoff containing pesticide residues can travel over land and enter nearby lakes, rivers or streams after rainfall or watering. These surface waters often provide drinking water downstream.

Spills, leaks or improper dumping of pesticide products during storage, transport or disposal can directly introduce concentrated doses of chemicals into ground and surface waters.

Pesticides are also designed to spread out and kill pests, not stay in one place. So they easily spread out and contaminate streams, lakes, aquifers, and other water sources we need for drinking.

How Pesticides Affect Our Bodies

I’ve talked a lot about pesticides in my videos, but they’re known endocrine disruptors that mimic estrogen, decrease testosterone, increase cortisol, and impair thyroid function. They also impair and inflame our digestive system and can interfere with liver function. Because of how they interact with our bodies, they can not only lead to fat accumulation, but can also contribute to more severe conditions like cancer.

When it comes to impairing thyroid activity, they can impair the thyroid gland directly, interfere with liver function, and block thyroid hormone at the cellular level. So basically, they’re harming thyroid activity at three different levels, which is obviously not ideal for normal metabolic function.

Summary

The situation with our tap water is clearly less than ideal, and these contaminants can ultimately impair hormone function. Estrogen mimicking compounds play a big role in fat accumulation, among other significant issues.

These contaminants can also impair liver function since they’re all toxic and your liver is your main detoxifier. If you’re liver is impaired, it’s likely that it won’t metabolize cortisol and estrogen as efficiently, which can further contribute to fat accumulation

And finally, these contaminants can down regulate thyroid activity, in more than one way, which is problematic since your thyroid controls your metabolic rate.

The Best Ways to Filter Your Water

Now that we’ve discussed many of the contaminants and how they impact our bodies, let’s quickly go over some recommendations for filters (These recommendations include affiliate links):

Pitcher Filters

Pitcher filters are a relatively inexpensive and an easy-to-use option. They can remove a variety of contaminants, including chlorine, sediment, and lead.

Generally, they don’t remove all the contaminants, but some filters are better than others. I personally used to use a Zero Water Filter (https://amzn.to/464Sfi4), which can remove more contaminants (e.g. PFAS and potentially sodium fluoride) than a simple carbon filter, like a Brita.

The problem with these is that the filters go bad every 4-6 weeks, which can be annoying. When the filter goes bad, the taste is very noticeable.

Side note - refrigerator filters have very similar properties as pitcher filters.

Reverse Osmosis (RO) systems

RO systems use a semipermeable membrane to remove a wide range of contaminants from water, including ALL of the contaminants previously listed. RO systems are the most effective type of water filtration system available. You’re drinking the cleanest water, that will literally only be H2O - that’s it.

There are two problems with them though:

• They’re the most expensive filter (up front). The countertop RO filter that I currently use (https://amzn.to/3ERDvHw), I bought for about $300, but the replacement filter is $60 and only needs replacing once a year.
• Because they remove everything from the water, even the good minerals, it’s best to remineralize the water. Doing this will help you stay hydrated.
• You can either use remineralization drops like this (https://amzn.to/3rz7Ibb)

Shower Filtration

This is often overlooked, but shower filters are very practical for the same reasons as using a filter for drinking water. Here are some reasons to use a shower filter:

• Your skin is permeable and can absorb tap water contaminants.
• Most people take hot showers that produce steam. Breathing in steam is another way to increase exposure to contaminants.
• Many people swear by shower filters, stating that they improve hair and skin quality.
• They’re easy to install - all you have to do is attach it to the shower head. When you turn on the shower, the water will flow through the filter and the contaminants will be removed.

This is the shower filter that I use (https://amzn.to/3ti3u8A)

Actionable Tip for the Week:

⭐️ Drink filtered water. Shower with it too. ⭐️

Hope you have a great Saturday! Talk to you next week.

Cheers,

Tim

PS: I take requests and suggestions. Let me know if there's anything you want me to write about or make a video about. Would love to hear from you!