Today there are major concerns about the state of the water we drink. The majority of us have it pumped into our homes from a city or county water treatment plant and the rest of us might get our water supply from a well on our property. Both of these sources have issues of their own and neither one is completely safe. Even though treatment facilities do as much as they can to ensure the water they supply some of us with is as safe as they can make it, it is still nowhere near as pure and clean as it should be.

Recently there has been a lot of controversy about the things that remain in the water even after it has been treated. Did you know that treated water can be riddled with drugs of all kinds? The drugs get in the water when people use their toilets and they are flushed into the system. Whatever drugs are taken into our bodies and are not absorbed is disposed of in the natural way. When this water is supposedly cleaned and returned back to us, the residues of drugs and other chemicals we ingest can remain.

Another controversial topic about our water these days concerns the fluoride that has been being added to water for years. People with wells do not have this particular problem, but anyone who has water supplied by their local water facility likely does. The reason fluoride was put into water to begin with was to aid in the growth and quality of teeth in growing children. It is now thought that this might not have been such a grand idea after all.

In 1997 our own Food and Drug Administration required that a warning label be put on dental products that include fluoride. It is said by some to possibly cause some cancers and other health issues even involving the teeth themselves that the fluoride is meant to protect. This can happen when too much fluoride is used on teeth or ingested into the body. So now, how are we to know whether using fluoride is a good thing or a bad thing? We need to consider that not everyone needs fluoride anyway.

Older people with dentures do not need fluoride. It could be said that small babies do not need fluoride because they do not even have teeth yet. Maybe we should stop fluoridating all the water just for this reason alone. If everyone does not need it, then they should not have to be exposed to it. Maybe we should be more concerned with finding better ways to take things out that are getting into and staying in our water supply like drugs and stop adding things that we are not even sure are safe for us or not.