I'll drink to that, OR, you are what you eat!

Lots of yammering and yawing about bottled water in plastic containers lately!

The Ontario government, along with many other municipalities and administrations across North America is taking a long hard look at plastic containers and the news is not good.

First of all, they did a blind study of bottled water vs. tap water in our local newspaper and found that there was really no great difference in taste between the two.

(We get our water sent down from a pipe that extends out into Lake Huron a couple of miles!)

These studies then went on to compare the quality of the water from the local system with that of bottled water and again found no great difference!

On top of that, it was estimated that tap water would cost you about two bucks a year to drink and bottled water could run up as high as $1,500- to $2,000-!

Quite a difference, eh?

Then, there was the problem of what to do with the bottles after they're used, since they don't de-compose very fast in landfills and could be around for a thousand years or more!

Well, so far common sense tells us to throw out the bottled water and go back to the tap!

Right?

Not so fast bunky!

These results were all from last week when they did a special on bottled water.

This week they are doing an expose' on tap water and the whole picture changes!

Oh sure, when it leaves the water filtration plant to be piped to our house it's nice and clean................. but!

If you drank tap water last summer in a London home with lead pipes, there's a 25% chance you were exposed to high levels of that toxic metal, just-released figures suggest.

Of 100 city-tested homes, about 25 failed to meet health standards in the latest water testing, the results worse than six months earlier when 21% of homes tested failed.

Drinking water in London and other Ontario municipalities can become highly corrosive after officials add an acidic chemical called alum to remove particles and bacteria.

To make its water less acidic, London officials have since last year added sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye or caustic soda, to water drawn from Lake Huron.

But, that proved more complex than officials expected.

While the water has become less acidic on average, that acidity, measured using a pH-scale, still varies a lot and each single-point change in pH can cause a six-fold rise in how much lead leaches out of pipes and solder.

An estimated 8,000 city homes have lead pipes and countless more buildings have lead solder plumbing.

What to do? What to do?

Drink beer?

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While we are on a health kick, people who eat the most red meat and the most processed meat have the highest overall risk of death from all causes, including heart disease and cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

The National Cancer Institute study is one of the largest to look at the highly controversial and emotive issue of whether eating meat is indeed bad for health.

Rashmi Sinha and colleagues looked at the records of more than 500,000 people aged 50 to 71 who filled out questionnaires on their diet and other health habits.

Even when other factors were accounted for -- eating fresh fruits and vegetables, smoking, exercise, obesity -- the heaviest meat-eaters were more likely to die over the next 10 years than the people who ate the least amount of meat.

"Red and processed meat intakes were associated with the biggest increase in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality," Sinha and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Studies from the "Perspective" research department have shown that people who eat less meat are healthier in many ways, and noted that meat contains several cancer-causing chemicals, as well as the unhealthiest forms of fat.

The U.S. government now recommends a "plant-based diet" that stresses fruits, vegetables and whole grains, but we here at "Perspective" hold to that old saying that, "we didn't climb to the top of the food chain to be no vegetarians," so we just recommend substituting white meat such as fish and foul for the red stuff!

(But no foul fish eh!)

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-Great post Allan, I have my seeds started and potager planned, it i will be a glorious next winter with lots of put up soups, broths, jams, veggies, and sauces. we also have several farms in the area that are, 'food with a face.' basically they are ethically treated animals and organically fed. I am for the most part vegetarian not vegan.
I reuse all my plastic bottles.
Arleen

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know......!) and is available as an E-Book H E R E ! and as a paperback H E R E !

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://allans-perspective.blogspot.com