Natural food stores and even major grocery chains are now offering bottled teas. While healthier than many beverage alternatives, bottled teas can be high in fluoride from pesticides and the use of fluoridated tap water for brewing. Even an organic, Fair Trade tea in glass bottles, like Honest Tea, is pricey and contains sugar. Also, since they don’t specifically say their tea is brewed with pure water, we can probably assume they use regular tap water, most of which is chock full of toxins and not fit for human consumption. And if you’re drinking green tea for its health benefits, according to Tod Cooperman, President and Founder of ConsumerLab.com, an independent testing laboratory that acts as a watchdog to the supplement and nutraceutical industries, bottled teas aren’t a good bargain. The most potent health benefits in green and white tea lie in their antioxidant polyphenols, primarily a type of polyphenol called catechins. Most research has been done on a particularly po…

Environmental toxins are overwhelming our immune and detoxification systems to make us the most allergy prone people in world history.  Simply drinking a glass of tap water can bombard your body with chemicals that have been linked to allergies and asthma. Allergist Elina Jerschow, MD, and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have linked chlorine-related chemicals known as dichlorophenols, which are found in tap water and in pesticides, with both allergies and asthma. These researchers found that people with the highest levels of dichlorophenols were 80% more likely to have a food allergy and 61% more likely to have both a food allergy and an environmental allergy (like pollen).  Subsequent research found a similar association between asthma and high levels of dichlorophenols in the urine. While more studies are needed to prove the chemicals cause either allergies or asthma, population studies have shown that there is a similar rise in bo…