Most of us focus on the obvious when it comes to wellness, what we eat, how we move, and how much we rest. But there’s another daily habit that could quietly be affecting our health: the water we drink. We often think about diet, exercise, and even sleep when it comes to our health, but how often do we think about our water? In this episode, I talk with Cydian Kaufman, water quality expert CEO of Pure Water Northwest, about what’s really in your tap water and how it could be affecting your energy, skin, and long-term health. Cydian explains the difference between “legal” and “healthy” water standards and shares practical tips on improving your water at home, from reverse osmosis systems to dealing with PFAS and other hidden contaminants. Know what you drink. Tune in now. --- Listen to the podcast here: Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Growing up on Long Island, my family, we always used some form of a water filter. It was always –– it was before Brita but there was a predecessor to it, now a lot of people use Brita, or we would use bottled water. However, living in Denver, we recently had a project where we reconstructed our water pipelines to get the lead out of the water. Since then, I’ve actually drank all my water out of the tap here in Denver, Colorado. Whether that’s the right decision or not, I am not sure, so I’m going to introduce to you my guest, Cydian Kauffman, who is one of the owners of Pure Northwest Water, to tell me about water as well as whether or not I’m making the right decision with this current situation. --- Cydian, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate being here. It’s Pure Water Northwest, by the way, just so you know. I love talking about water. I’d be happy to jump right in and talk about Denver specifically, if you like, however you want to approach it. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. All I do remember is that a few years ago, they reconstructed the pipelines here in Denver and they said the project was to get the lead out of the water and that, since then, I’ve, at least, in my head, felt like just drinking the water out of the tap was perfectly fine. It might be. What zip code are you in? What, if you don’t mind saying that? Oh, wow. Yeah, we’re getting fine-tuned here. I’m in 80205. Right. Let’s get specific. So, you’re on the Denver Water Board, water quality –– Yeah, but I’m not elected to any water position here. I just –– Yeah, I know. I mean, you’re on the main water in Denver, Colorado, Yeah, I assume. I mean, I’m only like a mile and a half east of downtown. All right, so if you look up, and most people in the country can do this, you can actually go look up water quality reports for whatever water quality you’re on, and there’s two ways to go about this. One is to just literally look up the water quality report for your municipality, which I’ve got right in front of me, two seconds of doing a Google search, I got the Denver Water Quality Report. Yeah, that’s going to bring you to a page with a bunch of lists of what they do and how they do it and, eventually, you’re going to get to exact contaminants that they test for and their results. If you don’t want to just take their word for it, though, you can go to a website called the EWG, the Environmental Working Group, then go to their tap water database, type in your zip code and find your municipality that way, and then you can kind of compare those two. Now, unfortunately for most people, this is going to be more annoying than good experience because there’s so much confusion in these lists, like what does it mean to have eight parts per billion of bromodichloromethane, which happens to be in Denver water. If you talk to someone like myself, we will know right away, bromodichloromethane, it’s a chlorine byproduct. It happens when you put chlorine in the water and it’s one of the total trihalomethanes, which is basically a category of chlorine byproduct that can be in the water. At really, really high amounts, you can have cancer from that. At the amounts that tend to be in municipalities, you would have to be very susceptible in order to get cancer from the amount of bromodichloromethane that happens to be in most municipalities. Some municipalities, though, have it at extremely high amounts. So, the particular water that you’re dealing with, it’s so much about your susceptibility to it and it’s so much about the amount that’s in the water, and it does require some expertise to interpret it and understand it, but doing that is definitely worthwhile. There’s a lot of solutions to get you there too. You mentioned certain chemicals, and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for anyone listening to follow bromodimethyl –– I’m probably –– Bromodichloromethane, yeah. You know what I mean? To follow all those chemicals. What are the general dangers that, say, the average person in any city across North America can face by drinking their city’s tap water on a daily basis? Well, they can face radium. They can face arsenic. They can face hexavalent chromium, which is that Aaron Brockovich chemical, nitrates, pesticides, PFAs, forever chemicals, pharmaceuticals, all of those things are in city water. Some of them are not properly or fully, let’s say, restricted by the Environmental Protection Agency. So, all of these things can be in city water. Additionally, the infrastructure of the city that you’re in may have wood pipes, may have old metal pipes that have lead in them. They can have over-chlorination, they can have under-chlorination. They can have any of these problems, and it becomes so burdensome to people that they just use a shorthand, “My water is good,” or, “My water is bad,” or, “The water in our city is good,” “The water in our city is bad.” The water in Denver is considered pretty good. And it is considered pretty good despite the fact that it has a little bit of radium in it, and that’s known by the municipality, and radium is radioactive. It’s got a ton of chlorine and chlorine byproducts, and it’s got some other volatile organic compounds, some metals, some herbicides, hexavalent chromium is in the water at very low amounts. Now, the reason why this doesn’t get reported or have anything done about it is because the human body is incredible at filtering. So, the EPA sets two standards for drinking water. They set a legal level, which is called the maximum contaminant level, and then they set a health level, which is called the maximum contaminant level goal, so it’s the MCL versus the MCLG. The MCL is less restrictive than the MCLG, so the legal level is less restrictive than the health level, meaning you can get water that is exceeding the EPA’s own health level but it’s legal, so the municipalities are allowed to have that be in the water. And the reason is, is because the cost of those municipalities actually removing it down to the levels that are healthy is virtually impossible for some of them. So then a choice is made. The EPA had to make a choice. They were like do we insist that they get us to the health level and risk that municipalities literally have to close their doors and hundreds of thousands of people don’t get water or do we allow some water through and put it on the homeowner to treat their own water if it’s over that level? So, obviously, they chose to not bankrupt these municipalities. Right. Now, if there is some contaminants, okay, I would say, I’m assuming that the EPA legal level, the relatively looser standard, if a municipality exceeds that, then it’s likely a really, really extreme health risk that people can encounter. But for the ones that are in between those two levels, in between the gold level and the standard level, what kind of health risks can occur, say, someone decides to drink that water and how effective is things like using a Brita filter or buying bottled water on preventing some of those? Great questions. How likely are those things to have an effect on people? Very unlikely. That is why they are at that level, because the majority of people do not feel effects from it. What effects have I seen? I’ve seen people have miscarriages because of it. I’ve seen people be sick, consistently sick, and not know why. I’ve seen my own daughter actually got eczema from very low levels of hardness in the water. And so the actual effects are very person based. These are rare occurrences that I’m noticing because I am in water treatment so I have customers talking to me and telling me what they’re dealing with, then I test their water and then I have to research outliers and kind of help them figure out what the cause is and then help them fix it. As far as standard solutions, like the simple solutions that you buy off the shelf, like Brita, that’s helpful a little bit with some things. The tricky part of that is this is science so we can’t just throw one thing at everything and have it work. Brita is carbon. It’s called granulated activated carbon and all it is is literally really finely chopped-up pieces of carbon. And carbon is amazing because a single gram of carbon, if spread out, the surface area of it is spread out, it would cover three tennis courts. That is how much filtration capacity it has. It’s incredible at filtering, but it’s not incredible at filtering everything. EPA level of arsenic, for the legal level of arsenic is 0.01 parts per million. If you’ve got 0.005 parts per million in your municipality, which I’ve seen a lot, carbon may remove it or it may not. You may be drinking arsenic, you may not be. If, on the other hand, you have chlorinated water, like you
