The vital importance of good water in our lives - a letter from Dr. Maria Monsalve

When a consumer thinks about a purchase of a food product, the first determinant is usually how much it costs, and not the impact the consumption of such food or health drink has.

It is difficult for the general public to measure the "today I save some money, and tomorrow will see what happens". Notions of how healthy food or drink is, no matter how “scientific” they may seem, remain ethereal considerations that have little to do with today, and the now.

That is why it is important that those of us who dedicate ourselves to this category of science measure in a reliable way the impact that food and drinks have on our health, and that this will hopefully weigh better the balance of saving now and getting sick later.

This is especially true in the case of water. They have hammered us so much with ideas like eating excess fat and sugars is bad and eating fruit and vegetables is good, but with water is something else. Bottled water is drunk because tap water often tastes bad but, do we know that it is worth drinking one type of water over the other? Is bottled water better than tap water? Are filters useful for something? Are some better than others?

The quick answer is that there is a big difference and a great impact on our health. Tap water is treated to prevent the growth of bacteria and travels many miles through pipes that are difficult to keep clean. Bottled water on the other hand is exposed to plastics that release toxic molecules into the water. Who has not felt the taste of chlorine in tap water, or the “plastic taste” of bottled water? It is not necessary to know about scientific studies to imagine that this can't be very healthy.

Alkanatur filters allow purifying tap water and restoring its natural ionic balance, but the question is whether this is going to help us in something. Our group has spent many years studying the impact of how alterations in the organism between oxidants and antioxidants affect the health of humans. For this reason, we bet on Alkanatur filters and decided to put Alkanatur water to the most difficult test to demonstrate its effectiveness against the development of tumors.

Why tumors? logically because although the toxins present in food and drinks can have many harmful effects, the development of tumors is probably the type of pathology in which toxins have a greater impact and it is not necessary to emphasize the seriousness of these types of diseases.

Conducting the study in humans would be extremely difficult, expensive, and would take many years to complete so we tested in mice. We gave half Alkanatur water to drink, and the other half, tap water, from Madrid.

From the moment they stop drinking breast milk, and upon reaching adulthood, in mice is about 12 weeks, we work on various tumors using three different protocols that sought to assess first how the mice defended themselves against a primary tumor (tumor cells), second, how it defended itself of a metastasis and third, its ability to defend itself against the liver's cells that become tumors developing a hepatocellular carcinoma.

The first results were obtained with the primary tumors, and the result was evident as soon as they were extracted from the animal. Whereas tumors developed in mice treated with Alkanatur water were well encapsulated, those in mice treated with tap water were highly irregular and hemorrhagic. These features point to the organism having defended itself better when it drank Alkanatur water, there was better content of the primary tumor and was in a position to better prevent tumor cells from leaving the bloodstream and initiating a metastasis.

So we launched the second metastatic lung nodule formation test, and as soon as we removed the lungs, we could see the differences: mice treated with Alkanatur water formed fewer lung nodules than mice treated with regular water, indicating that the mouse that drank the filtered water defended itself better of the development of metastases.

The results in liver tumors confirm that with Alkanatur-filtered water, tumor angiogenesis (tumor-associated vasculature) is of better "quality". That is, it has characteristics generally associated with a lower risk of metastasis.

These results confirm the observations of the xerographic study (primary tumor-induced), where the same thing was observed: worse vasculature, associated with a greater number of hemorrhages in the mice that drank tap water. Which generally indicates an increased risk of metastasis.

After carrying out this study, the scientists who collaborate have been the most surprised by the magnitude of the observed changes. We are used to seeing few things worsens or improve, but here there weren't just a few, they were very dramatic and clear changes, which show the importance of good water in our lives.