Drinking Microbial active water

I just had a “shower” thought.

I often find drinking water straight from nature, up in the forests for example, as much better than municipal tap water that has been chlorinated and with possible traces of estrogen and fecal matter - stuff I honestly don’t want to put into my body. I also have the belief that store bought water has been stripped of everything beneficial,  which is also a negative for me.

So I was thinking…how can I “create” natural water.

Rain water + ?

What if, like how I feed my plants a liquid fertilizer, I make a microbally active liquid “tea” for my own consumption? Soil from an indigenous forest or from my own property (if I knew the history of the farm). Fruit peels that have been grown by me to make sure no chemicals have been sprayed on it. Maybe even a touch of worm juice, say diluted to 1:1000.

I don’t see how the water I drink from a river in the middle of a forest as different to a homemade tea.

What’s your take on this? Has it been done and explored?

I know what you mean Riis,
We have mains water at our shop, and are currently using stream water at home. The difference in taste is striking. We should be on spring water at home (previously tested good at zero biological count), but that is still needing refurbishment, so as we have grazing animals about, we make sure all our drinking water at home is boiled for safety - don't bother with washing water of course.

The shop water is not too bad when put through a charcoal filter - that takes most of the chemical taste away, but it is still not as good as home water.

I think I'd be reluctant to mix soil or worm juice with drinking water myself without some sort of safety testing or treatment. As well as pretty nasty bacterial infections, there would presumably be a risk of parasites. Rainwater should be pretty safe - depending on the surface and storage container. I'm sure there are other threads discussing this on this forum.

Many people think that hard water tastes better. I wonder if you could use chalk as a filter medium to take the taste of the chemicals away and add something to the taste of your tap water without compromising on safety? Just a thought.

I was also thinking about possibilities of parasites. So there is caution in this. My mind just thinks about kids that eat sand in the play pit, etc. Look, it’s not ideal, but it gets me thinking about our micro-gut biome and how it can be “fed”. Even eating unwashed carrots from the garden. It just makes sense to me when I look at monkeys/baboons (apparently we can eat everything a baboon eats if we are in a survival mode). Our health, I believe, starts in our guy biome, which essentially is our “soil”.

I recommend 100% Water Kefir, which is different from regular kefir which is milk based, actually you could probably add a single teaspoonful of milk kefir to it too to bring up the species count from 12 to 60.

I am having trouble understanding why you would add worm juice to water and drink it?
Are you trying to create a 'probiotic' drink from it a bit like those promoted made from milk I think?

As for creek water in a forest it can technically be adulterated by animals, but since the oxygenation that occurs in cleaning the water and the
miniscule chance of animal dung being in it I guess the risk has been proven to be low.

Rainwater is different, and while generally its good quality some people are concerned about dust, agricultural sprays and bird poop all can be risky.
Rainwater is oxygenated on the way down and I think gardeners think its nitrogen rich. [ correct me if I am wrong] and others love the stuff.

Exactly my thoughts. A type of probiotic water. We can use an oxygenator to keep the water bubbling. Maybe add some banana peels, veggie scraps etc, and brew a fresh batch every couple days. But the water kefir sounds interesting I’ll check it out

Riis Lemmer wrote:
So I was thinking…how can I “create” natural water.

If you haven't come across the work of Viktor Schauberger, I think you would find it quite interesting. He studied the nature of water in its natural environment (mainly rivers in virgin forests in Austria) and came up with some fascinating observations about water's physical and energetic properties (particularly how it moves in vortex patterns). He understood the interdependence of healthy forests and rivers and they hydrological cycle. He was at least a century ahead of his time.

Then, he spent the rest of his life attempting to invent machines to take advantage of water's unique properties (including the prototypical saucer shaped "UFO's"), and also to create natural spring water mechanically. Unfortunately he was a much brighter observer and thinker than an inventor and businessman, and died broke after being swindled out of all his intellectual property by some unscrupulous American "investors".

But his legacy lives on in more recent generations inspiring devices that seek to restructure water into its natural high-vibratory state by vortex action and running it over certain minerals and semi-precious stones.

When kayaking I once drank a handful of biological active water from the stream I was in, because I did not bring any water with me.
I just about got away with it, but drinking any more would have probably ended up with me being sick for a few days.

Fermenting vegetables usually results in very good tasting liquid being produced as well. That should be much safer than drinking unfiltered rainwater.

there are some people who dilute and drink "JMS" which is an active culture of microbes from leaf mold soil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIRvmA2Gkgs&vl=en

never tried it myself, but report back if you do!

Riis Lemmer wrote:I just had a “shower” thought.

I often find drinking water straight from nature, up in the forests for example, as much better than municipal tap water that has been chlorinated and with possible traces of estrogen and fecal matter - stuff I honestly don’t want to put into my body. I also have the belief that store bought water has been stripped of everything beneficial,  which is also a negative for me.

So I was thinking…how can I “create” natural water.

Rain water + ?

What if, like how I feed my plants a liquid fertilizer, I make a microbally active liquid “tea” for my own consumption? Soil from an indigenous forest or from my own property (if I knew the history of the farm). Fruit peels that have been grown by me to make sure no chemicals have been sprayed on it. Maybe even a touch of worm juice, say diluted to 1:1000.

I don’t see how the water I drink from a river in the middle of a forest as different to a homemade tea.

What’s your take on this? Has it been done and explored?

I'd say drinking from a stream could be a really bad idea. There might be a dead animal upstream and you might get seriously ill.
Our tap water is dosed with chlorine and fluoride, getting rid of that is a good idea.

Drinking unsafe water is a massive contributing factor to poverty in the developing world. Waterborne pathogens are not to be messed about with, and can make you sick in the short term and potentially cause permanent damage to your body in the long term.

I've drunk stream water on many occasions, usually with no ill effects. You can take some common sense precautions - stay away from livestock and where people are etc... but you simply cannot tell if water is safe. On one memorable occasion I was on a week long walking/camping expedition and got some horrific gastric bug on about day 4 of 7. Not an experience I want to repeat. I'm pretty sure it was from mishandling water, despite using purification tablets.

A further thought; if you don't like the implications of industrially purified water you might want to look into slow-sand filters for your drinking water. The rely on a biological processes to digest harmful pathogens.

I would second Michael's recommendation of slow sand filters. Rainwater and other sources of natural water are great, but in some places there are pathogens to be concerned with. Slow sand filters are an excellent way to deal with that. I have used one with rainwater and tested the resulting water for E. coli and total coliforms. Zero in the water that had been through the slow sand filter vs. probably 100+ colonies in the unfiltered water. So they're quite effective and very easy to construct. The beneficial bacteria that do the work do take some time to get established, so they're not immediately effective. You could probably use one for other water sources too, though I haven't tried that. It is important to know they only filter out biological contaminants and not chemical ones.
Perhaps you could even incorporate particular types of stone to add some beneficial minerals to the water?

Another thing you might consider as far as more living water is cold infusions of fresh herbs. Just take a handful or so of your chosen plants and put them in some water. I usually put mine in the fridge, though you could probably leave them at room temperature for about a day. Then drink. I'm sure the plants have some beneficial microbes hanging out, minerals and other beneficial constituents to boot. You could use fruits or veg too, cucumbers, lemon, etc. All would be adding some microbes and water that had been flowing through a living system to your infused water. Without the risk of getting sick from less friendly microbes.