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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

I know it sounds ridiculous, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment: We've evolved drinking "dirty" water until very recent history. It might be that there are some unknown negative effects that come from drinking filtered/purified water. Or some unknown positive health effects of drinking unfiltered water.

It's slowly coming out that modern medicine occasionally gets things wrong and we have to correct our intuitions (sugars, fats, sun exposure), but if you think from a simple evolutionary perspective, these things often make a lot of sense.

I'm not drinking unfiltered water, but there's some potential rationale behind it.

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To reinforce the point made by 'katrielalex - we drink purified water not because it's a fad, but because we know - and this is where medicine is not wrong - that things in dirty water cause illness and death. To outweigh that, our medicine would have to miss some serious health risks of filtered water - big enough that we would surely notice them by now.

In general, I feel that a lot of sympathy for those "natural" things stem from not bothering to put a numeric value on actual risks and benefits involved. Getting a 0.01% risk of cancer from an "unnatural" habit beats the hell out of getting 10% risk of death from a disease that this habit prevents.

Another point is that these days, we pollute the environment much more than in the past; "raw water" of today is often full of industrial waste products, so in a way our own civilization forces us to filter it.

You have to account for the fact that before modern filtration civilizations developed other ways to make water safe to drink, like brewing beer and boiling water for tea.

We evolved dying of dystentery in our very recent history too.

This is the same argument against vaccines.

And you can't win that argument in the face of hard facts.

Poorer countries don't have the luxury to drink filtered water. And you know how many of those populations die of diseases from such 'holy spring water'.

Once there's a number of reproducible, peer reviewed, studies then maybe it's time to have this discussion.

Until then, we have pretty good real-time evidence that drinking dirty water is one of the highest causes of mortality in the world.

> Once there's a number of reproducible, peer reviewed, studies then maybe it's time to have this discussion.

That's a chicken-and-egg problem. Who is going to start doing peer-reviewed studies until someone doubts the status quo?

> I'm not drinking unfiltered water, but there's some potential rationale behind it.

There's also a potential basis for that increasing trend-line for life expectancy... well, up until the last two years, anyway. :o)

unfiltered water => worms, bacteria, death especially if you're in the warmer zone of the Earth.

The most hilarious part about the "unfiltered water" fad, to me, is that it probably has a bunch of hipsters drinking industrial run-off and many of the same chemicals they rally against.

That's not to say I disagree with them about industry destroying water supplies or poisoning us with various poorly-understood chemicals. It's just the lack of self awareness that I find amusing.

> industry destroying water supplies or poisoning us with various poorly-understood chemicals

iodine? chloride? Which one of those is not well understood? :)

I thought it would be pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about either of those. The dead give-away should have been the "poorly-understood" part.

Yup. And I don't for a second buy that this "raw water" isn't in reality some industrial-grade tap water or sourced from whatever lake they could get access to cheaply.

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