I’m not here to argue trickledown economics, but I will say there are sometimes trickledown effects from events, policies, and decisions. Sometimes they are unanticipated and unintended. Sometimes they are from something as simple as drinking water.
We’ve lived under excessive heat warnings here most days in the past two weeks. I never leave my home without a bottle of water. After almost burning my hand on one I left in the car for two hours, I have vowed to also carry an ice chest at all times.
You’re probably thinking, just get an insulated water bottle. Believe me, I’ve been through my share of double-walled tumblers. One tumbles right out of my cup holder each and every time I try to use it. One doesn’t fit my cup holder at all. Another one has an annoying top. The only one I currently like, I use to keep French press coffee hot every morning. I’m not going to use it in the car.
All of this makes me more likely to carry commercially bottled water by default. Perfect, bottled water. Easy to carry. Easy to drink. Popular enough for over 15.9 billion gallons of it to be sold in the US in 2022. Why is this even worth mentioning?
Most of us drink bottled water with the intent of staying hydrated during our busy on-the-go lives. Increasingly, we seek out water that is alkaline, electrolyte-rich, caffeinated, or fortified with additional hydrogen or oxygen. I assume these preferences are an effort to be healthy.
It’s great to want to be healthy, but you may be overlooking one simple thing that is missing from bottled water, fluoride. Some people may think that’s a good thing since there’s an ongoing controversy about it. But the retired Army colonel I spoke with yesterday told a different story that went something like this…
Prior to 9/11/2001, kids were more likely to play outside with less supervision. When they needed a drink, they grabbed some water from the tap or garden hose. That changed on a dime with a terrorist attack.
Mothers became more cautious. Kids came inside where they didn’t lift their own body weight or run around as much. As more screens became available, they spent more time on them. They drank more bottled water without fluoride.
Kids still grew. They looked normal. But when recruits showed up at training camp, they were fragile. Not snowflake fragile (although possibly that too), but bone break fragile.
What the Army discovered was that if they built muscle too swiftly during training, bones would simply snap. They didn’t have the density and strength of previous generations of soldiers. According to the colonel, drinking non-fluoridated water while their bones were developing was a contributing factor to this change.
And if that unintended consequence isn’t enough, we now know the plastic bottles leach microplastics that can end up in our bloodstream and contribute to the seriousness of heart disease. The most prominent plastic found in blood by researchers was polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common type of plastic used in making drink bottles, food packaging and fabrics, as well as lip gloss.
It seems the trickledown effects of added efforts to protect our children turned out to endanger them in unanticipated ways. This kind of unintended consequences occur frequently and often in spite of our best efforts. Once they recognized the problem, the Army learned to train recruits for 100 days in a manner that would balance bone and muscle strength.
The rest of us may only be fighting everyday wars, but we can follow the Army’s example and put new knowledge to good use whenever we discover a trickledown effect that is detrimental to our health.
Dehydration can increase gastrointestinal symptoms and joint pain. Today it’s 97º with a heat index of 105º. I’ve been without power for the past 4 days since a tree took down my electric lines in a storm. The air is back on now, but it still feels hot in my house. Even minor activity like wiping out the refrigerator I had emptied early in the outage causes me to break a sweat…inside…in the air conditioning. I keep drinking water, but I feel like I can’t get ahead. 