In today's Tuesday Terrain Talk Episode of The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach Podcast, we’ll dive into the overwhelming world of water filtration. I’ll simplify the abundance of confusing information when it comes to how safe or clean our water is and what to consider when you think about using a filtration system. 

The vast amount of information and options available make it challenging to distinguish between marketing ploys and genuine health benefits. 

The goal of today’s show is to provide helpful information so you can make an informed decision when it comes to deciding how safe you feel about what’s in your water. 

Water plays a crucial role in our metabolism, cellular fluid, digestion, and overall well-being so insuring that we remove “forever chemicals” and other impurities from the water we consume on a regular basis can have an important impact on our health. 

In this episode I’ll share informative resources and affordable options that can fit many budgets and lifestyles. 

Watch the full episode on my YouTube Channel. 

Referred to in this episode: 

#44 Hydration, Fatigue, Glowing Skin and Weight Loss 

Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership 

Hydration in Fruits and Veggies 

Protecting Against forever Chemicals 

Brita Review 

What does Berkey Remove? 

Water Filter Comparisons 

Digging Into the Environmental Working Group Tap Water Database 

MyTapWater.org Zip code database search 

Read the full transcript below:

Laura Lummer  00:00

You're listening to the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a Certified Life health and nutrition coach, and I'm also a breast cancer thriver. If you're trying to figure out how to move past the trauma and the emotional toll of breast cancer, you've come to the right place. In this podcast, I will give you the tools and the insights to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer. Well, let's get started.

Laura Lummer  00:32

Hello, hello, welcome to episode 247 of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. And this is our Tuesday terrain talk. So Tuesday terrain talks are episodes that I have created, to hopefully clarify and simplify and provide you with information on the various things you can do to support your terrain, the overall health of your body. These are not episodes that address medications or pharmaceuticals, and they're not medical advice. I just wanted to be able, for those of you who love the research, to give you some specific research to help you with very specific topics each week, so that you could feel like you're making informed decisions. And that you're making the decision that feels the safest for you, when it comes to what you put in, on and around your body. Now, before you change anything significant, or chain, make dietary changes or supplements or anything like that, if you hear them on the show, make sure and discuss them with your doctor, especially if you're taking other medications or you're being treated for any kind of active disease is very important to take care of yourself first. And that's one of the reasons that I want to start this episode. Because there's so much conflicting and confusing information and so much inflammatory information out there in the world, that here we come either living with breast cancer, or dealing with breast cancer or trying to serve our body's ability to heal in some way. And then we get overwhelmed by all the information that's out there. And so we end up not doing anything at all. And that's just how overwhelm ends out. That's the result that is created when we feel overwhelmed in our mind. Today's episode is no different. I know for me personally, this was one area where I felt very overwhelmed. After my breast cancer diagnosis, I had a good understanding of food. Yet I still had overwhelmed there because I was trying to decide which path to take when it came to nourishing my body with food. But then when it came to water, there was even more. It was crazy. It was like How can this be so hard? It's water for God's sake, right. But there's a lot of information. And there are a lot of things that are different about the quality of our water, depending on where you live, then there are all kinds of options. As far as water filters. What do you need? What don't you need? What do they take out? What do you feel safe, having them take out what's important to you what's not so important to you. And then after water filters, there are these ionizing machines. And there are different machines that say change the molecular structure of water. So when I started getting into that, I thought this is a lot. You know, this is a lot. And I don't know what to believe. I don't know what's marketing. I don't know what's inflammatory, as far as non inflammatory for my body, but inflammatory as far as making things sound worse than they are. It took me a lot of time. And finally I found some resources that I really trusted. And in listening to those resources, I was able to make a decision that I felt very comfortable with. And I'll share that decision with you here on this show. Now, I do not make any money. And I'm not here to support any brand and I'm not going to shame brands and I'm not going to talk about anything beyond just your basic filtration. And in the show notes for this episode, the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash 247. I will give you links to information to help you make a decision if cleaning up your water and having a water filter in your home is something that is important to you. So let me give you a little bit of my story, which I already kind of did, right you get a cancer diagnosis. And obviously my first diagnosis was in 2011. Water was an issue. And so I had filtered water in my house and I used a Brita Filter Pitcher and I thought that that was really good, right I thought that was effective. And the thing that helped me think it was really effective is because I live in Huntington Beach and in the city of Huntington Beach. We are on a toilet to tap water system. That sounds gross right off the bat. Right? And so it kind of grossed me out and our water in my opinion has an odor to it. Right? It doesn't smell like toilet water but it has an odor and like a lot of strong chlorine odor as well. And when I used the Beretta that went away. So for a long time I use that. And sometimes I was really good at making sure to replace the filter on time. Sometimes I wasn't. And I think like so many things, when we just get used to life, we kind of the urgency and some things starts to slip away the the red flags that we maybe thought were really important and felt very intense to us initially, kind of calmed down a little bit. And I think that's kind of what happened with waters, like we had a Britta didn't much think about it. And then when I got my stage four diagnosis, and 2020, of course, I buckled down even harder, right, and I started looking at so many different aspects and how I could go deeper into everything, and water was one of them. And again, I was just completely overwhelmed by the amount of information and claims about different water, and what to believe and what not to believe. I knew very quickly, that what I was using, as this pitcher, this water pitcher in my refrigerator was not going to cut it for what felt safe to me. And I'll give you a few reasons why for that, I looked up, you know what Brita filters took out and what they didn't take out. And some of the things that are in our water, which are referred to as forever chemicals, and they have a big long scientific name, I'm not Andrew Huberman, so I'm just going to call them p. FAS, and PFA s are something that I will also put a link to here in the show notes that you can read about. And forever chemicals are really chemicals that are produced by they're kind of an industrial waste. And they're called Forever chemicals. Because they're there forever, they stay in our environment forever, people science has not yet figured out how to get them out of our environment or out of our bodies. And so that's why we have to be very careful about where we're taking in these forever chemicals. And again, I don't want to scare you. So I'm going to not scare you. And I'm not going to dwell on this, I'm just going to say that they are out there. And that, you know, municipal water companies, they abide by their guidelines and government guidelines and government standards. And I'm sure that they produce what is considered safe by government standards to put into, you know, the city water. But what is considered safe? What does that mean? And what did they take out of the water I wanted to know. So I will also you'll find a link here, that tells you, you can just put in your zip code. And wherever you are, it'll bring up what's in your city water. And I thought that was really great, because it shows you how many contaminants and again, like so many other things in life, maybe this isn't something you need to be that concerned about. Maybe where you live, you have a really clean water source and good for you. That'd be awesome. But maybe where you live, it's not so much. And maybe you want to take a step towards getting more things, filtering more things out of your water that you weren't even aware of, we're in there. Because don't go down this, I don't want to know Road, okay, I don't want to know doesn't help anybody burying our head in the sand doesn't help us because whatever's there is already there. And I'm going to give you some simple and what I think are very affordable alternatives to or options, not necessarily alternatives, but options to use a water filtration system. As I said, for many years, I used a Britta and if you look at Britta and you think okay, that's within my budget, then use a Beretta, because I would say filtering, some is better than filtering nothing, right. But if you want to go a little bit deeper, I'm going to give you some resources that I found that do go deeper. And then as I said, there are others that that claim to actually change the molecular structure of water. And I don't know enough about them to speak to them. And they require a lot of research that I just didn't think was important enough to go into. But I will give you a resource that I thought was great, where it looks at a water filtration, comparison, and you can learn more there. So I was really careful as I pulled together this information to try not to give you links that were going to be like skewed information to somebody that was selling something necessarily if it didn't have very clear science or links to good evidence on what these filtration systems did for you. Okay, so first, I'm just going to briefly talk about why water is important. And I'm going to refer you to Episode 44 of this podcast for more information which I did a whole episode on hydration and why hydration is important, and how our skin is affected by hydration how our energy levels are affected by hydration, and what happens to us as we go through treatments and we use drugs and chemotherapy and radiation and how they affect our hydration status. So for all that there's a link that you can listen to episode number 44 and learn more about hydration for your body. But let's talk about how the human body is referred to. Now most of the time We hear people say, hey, the human bodies, mostly water. And if you look it up the average human body they say is 60%. Water 60% Water. Now it fluctuates a little between men and women, and between the body fat content, think about that. Are you a water balloon? You're not a water balloon, right? I'm not going to poke you with a needle and water comes pouring out of you. So if you're 60% Water, where's it? What's going on with the water? Right? It's lubricating us. It's part of our cellular fluid inside ourselves. And outside of ourselves. It helps to move minerals through the cell walls, it helps to keep our digestion going. It allows us to have regular and not uncomfortable elimination and bowel movements, saliva, watery eyes, all those things. So we have this saline solution that's in our bodies, right? Think about it when you're sick. What's one of the first things that happens? If you go to the doctor, they put you on an IV, what is that IV do hydrates you with this saline solution, right? So it's water, but it has the same sodium content as the human body's water has. So water is used in so many functions, it's not like we're just walking around jiggling with a one arm full of water, right? We stay hydrated, and this water is a part of the processes that go on in our body. So when we are using so much water for our metabolism, and for everything that happens in our metabolism, when our body is comprised of and needing that much water to function properly, we want to make sure that that water is good quality right. Now, we also take in water from other sources, fruits and vegetables. And again, right, they're not little water balloons, the water is contained in the cells of these foods. And so having good quality foods, as we've talked about choosing organic foods wherever possible, or following the guidelines from the Dirty Dozen, and the clean, 15. And ensuring that you have the cleanest possible produce is also an important thing, because we've taken a lot of water through our food. And I have put a link here to a free download that you can get where I put in many different fruits and vegetables and the water content in those fruits and vegetables. So it's a cool thing to have on hand to refer to to think oh yeah, I'm getting in water this way too. Now, the recommendation of for water intake in most wellness areas is to drink half your body weight in ounces of water daily. But that fluctuates for everybody, because it depends on how active you are, how much you sweat, how much you're doing, how hot it is outside how cold it is outside. So we take all those things into consideration. But basically, you can use as a simple guideline, if you feel thirst, you're dehydrated, right? That's an indication, it's like our body needs to have hydration before it sends out this signal of thirst. And so if we keep our body hydrated, then we don't feel like okay, I really need a glass of water right now. So that's a sign of mild dehydration when you feel that. So with all that being said, then we have to make this decision. How much water filtration is important to you. Do you want a whole house filter? Is a Britta going to do it? Do you need something that you want to use to make your coffee and your tea and your cooking water? Our skin is is huge, beautiful porous, Oregon, and we shower and we bays How important is it to you to have a filtration system on your bathing water? So we can consider all of these and I think it's a good thing for you to consider say, are those things super important to me? Or is this one thing enough? And if I have this, I'm good. Or if I look up my zip code, and my water quality says whatever rating? I think that's good, right? So consider what does that mean to you? And at what level of filtration Do you feel safe? Because that's the important thing, right? The important thing about taking care of the terrain of our body is knowing that we're doing what we feel we have the ability to do, the resources to do and that we feel safe with are making a safe and informed decision. For me, I wanted filtered water for the things that I cooked for my drinking water and for my shower. And so I started looking and I wanted to listen to other people who used filtration systems I wanted to hear what did they use? Why did they use it? Why was it important? And over and over again, I heard in the cancer world if you're treating active cancer, if you're supporting the health of your train that for you, the Britta is not going to cut it is what I was told by people so I said okay, so then what's the next step? And you know, we can get into alkaline water and all that stuff. But again, I said that's that's too much for me right now. All right, I just want to know good filtration system that's more than I can deal with at this point. And I the capacity that I had to dig into a deeper, it just wasn't there, right? It wasn't one of those things where I thought I want to spend a lot of time doing this, I would feel comfortable with a really good filtration system. And what was recommended to me over and over again, was a Berkey filtration system. So I'll put a link to that. And again, this is not a link that I'm getting paid for. I'm only sharing that with you because I use it. And because what I found was that this seemed to me to be the most affordable way of getting a lot of really great filtration. And it was an easy system. Mine is a two and a half gallon system. And it's just myself and my husband at home. So that was easy for me. Plus, if you have more people at home, they have larger systems, and they're easy to refill. So for me, I thought that will work. We can use that for cooking and for drinking water. And I also bought the little shower filter that hooked on easily to the showerhead in our bathroom. And I felt good about that. And I felt good because I asked people or listened to people like Chris Warrick from crispy cancer like Nisha winters. And in our study program who said, this is a good system. And it's a very affordable system, it sits on the counter, it looks very nice, they have little stands for it, they have these beautiful metal containers, they look lovely. And when I looked into it, it filters out hundreds and hundreds of contaminants. And it was filtered out many, many by far more than any other counter system that I looked at. And that does not mean like one that's actually hooked into my plumbing is just one where you pour water in, and it pours you clean water out. So it's got different filters in it. And it was important to me to also filter fluoride out of my water system. So it has black filters, which filter hundreds of contaminants. And then the fluoride filters which take the fluoride out also. And I feel really good about that. And I thought it was a really cool test, that when you put your Berkey together and you put your filters in, it comes with this red food dye, and you put the red food dye in the top container, it goes through the filters, and then there's a little spigot at the bottom. And once it goes through the filters, if it's constructed correctly, if you put your filters in the right way, then the water that comes out of the bottom is perfectly clear, no red dye in it right. So the top container is red as can be. But the water that comes out is clear. And I thought that's pretty impressive, right? So it's showing it's definitely doing its job filtering that water. And everything I read on it the science on is really good. So I will put links to that. But one of the things I thought about especially when I was talking about this podcast is again, oftentimes I hear people say, Hey, I'm going through treatment, or I've just been through treatment, and it's really expensive. And I don't have the money for all this stuff. Now, again, you can buy a filter that ranges from 30 bucks up to 1000s and 1000s of dollars, right? So I wanted to be able to give you a tip also on what could you do if you want to spend less than $100. And Berkey actually has a sports water bottle that has one of the black filters in it that are those filters that take out hundreds of contaminants in the water. And they're like $50. So I thought that is a really cool resource. Because no matter where you are, and I have one, so no matter where you are, if you're traveling, you can take your Berkey sports bottle with you, you can pour other bottled water through it, you can go to the water fountain and fill it up. And you can have filtered water in that sports bottle. So I thought that was a good tip for this show. Because if nothing else, if none of these other filtration systems work for you, or your living arrangements don't accommodate something like a big water filter, then having something like a sports bottle water filter that's been proven to be really effective, I think could be really cool, right? So again, I'll put the link to Berkey on here, this is not a sales pitch, I do not make any money from this, I'm only referring it to you because that was my personal choice that I ended up going with. And I want to be very clear that that doesn't mean there aren't other good choices out there. And it doesn't mean that you don't need alkaline water or you don't need ionized water that is not at all what I'm saying, for this specific show. I'm giving you links so you can do more research if you want. But I'm sharing with you the process that I went through in looking at different filtration systems, looking at what I was willing to invest in a filtration system and comparing that to what was important to me and where I felt safe that I was doing a good job of supporting my health in the best way that I could and that's where I ended up okay. So please, this is not against any brand or for any brand either. just sharing with you my personal decision and giving you information so that you can look further into all kinds of different filtration systems depending on how deep you want to go and make a decision for yourself. But I just wanted to share some that were, I think, very doable that so check out the links here, put your zip code into the zip code water analysis binder and check it out for yourself. See what your water is, don't be afraid of it. I'm also posting a link to an article that I thought was really great, because this article addressed how sometimes people use like, you know, ew G and environmental agencies, sometimes they try to put out really good quality information and do a lot of research. But then people who are selling things like to take that information and spin it and twist it and scare us with it. I'm tired of being scared, and I don't want you to be scared. So I'm posting that article so you can read it, I thought it was a very down to earth very realistic approach and looking at what is actually necessary, and what is actually over the top right so that we can again make informed decisions that help us feel safe, that don't leave us in fear and panic and overwhelm, and then not taking any steps at all to do what we can to clean up our environment and support having the healthiest terrain possible. All right, my friends, check out the links come and talk to me ask me your questions, you can join my free Facebook group, the breast cancer recovery group, which is found on Facebook, or join me in my coaching program, the better than before breast cancer life coaching membership, where you will also find my programs, 90 days of wellness and becoming you those are all included inside the program and 90 days of wellness digs really deep into a lot of stuff that supports our terrain as well and helps you take a heart centered approach to your health. So you're not stressing out and freaking out and overwhelmed and worried about following the right dietary label that you're understanding how to tune into your body. Listen to you feel safe with what you're doing with yourself and feel like you are the expert on your body and your health and what you're ready to change. All right, you can find all that information on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com And I look forward to talking to you again on Friday take care of friends