Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health regimen.
Most people ask me about tap water contaminants after they've already spent money on a filter. They bought the pitcher, or the under sink system, or the big expensive unit, and they assumed the problem was handled. Then I run a hair test and find uranium or radium sitting in their tissue anyway.
I'm a Kansas City native. I've pulled the reports on the water supplies around my area, and atrazine is listed as one of the chemicals in them. Nobody is adding it on purpose. We have a large farming community, that runoff reaches the water supply, and it isn't being completely removed.
I sat down with Dr. Todd Watts, the biochemistry guy who taught half my class how to read labs, to talk through what's actually moving through the pipes. If you've been doing everything right and still feel off, this conversation might be the piece you're missing.
What's actually in municipal water that nobody warns you about?
Atrazine is a herbicide sprayed on corn and sugar cane, plus crops like macadamia nuts and pineapple. Dr. Todd calls it the second most used chemical behind glyphosate, and almost nobody has heard of it.
What it does in the human body is disrupt hormones. In the frog studies, it turned male frogs into female frogs, to the point they could reproduce. In men it feminizes. In women it defeminizes. It has a high affinity for the thyroid, and Dr. Todd connects it to obesity and neurological issues too.
Atrazine isn't alone in there. Municipal water has been tested and found to contain prescription medications, farming chemicals, road chemicals, and whatever else gets sprayed on the ground upstream of you. Glyphosate is in that same category. A researcher who has studied it since 1975 told Dr. Todd it inhibits 291 enzymatic reactions in the body. It binds to enzymes and neutralizes them.
Why do your labs look normal while you feel awful?
I look at bloodwork every week where the doctor said everything was fine. I'll tell those clients the same thing I'll tell you: a clean CBC and CMP mean you probably aren't dying of natural causes anytime soon. They say nothing about whether you feel well.
That gap is where people get dismissed. You were told your numbers are great, so the fatigue, the stomach aches, the brain fog, the hormone chaos must be stress or age or in your head.
Testosterone is the clearest example. Conventional labs often flag low at around 250 or below. Dr. Todd puts the real line closer to 500. Decades ago, 800 to 1300 was considered normal. I've run my own and sit in the 800 to 900 range naturally, and I work for it: organic food, distilled water, red light, movement. There are stats showing testosterone has dropped nearly 50 percent since 1960. In kids, Dr. Todd notes that obese boys run about 50 percent less testosterone than their thinner classmates, likely because they're storing more of these chemicals.
Your lab range moved with the population. That's not the same thing as you being fine.
Is the real problem the bug, or the water it's living in?
This is where terrain theory matters more than germ theory. Pasteur gave us the idea that you catch a bug and the bug makes you sick. Béchamp, working at the same time, argued the terrain comes first: the organism shifts form because the environment shifted.
You have more than 40,000 named species of bacteria in your digestive tract alone, plus viruses, fungus, and parasites. They're native to you. Without them you can't digest food, make energy, or produce the neurotransmitters that keep your mood steady.
Now pour atrazine, glyphosate, road chemicals, and trace uranium through that ecosystem every single day. The population balances shift. Organisms that were commensal change form and start producing things that damage tissue. H. pylori is the classic case. It's a beneficial organism in the right terrain and a problem in the wrong one.
Think of your house on fire. The smoke is your symptom. Western medicine puts up a facade over the smoke. A lot of functional medicine adds more 2x4s and fresh paint. The foundational approach puts the fire out first, then rebuilds. If you're drinking the fire every morning, no protocol is going to hold.
Here's the other analogy Dr. Todd uses, and I steal it constantly. You move into a house with a yard full of weeds. You don't throw grass seed on top and hope. You clear the weeds, feed the soil, water it, and then you plant. Probiotics on a toxic terrain are seed on weeds.
What does this look like in a real kitchen?
Buy a distiller and forget to clean it. We did that at my clinic, about four weeks on our mid-sized unit. When we finally opened it there was a half inch of sewer-smelling residue ringed around the evaporation chamber. We soaked it repeatedly and it came off in chips. We photographed it, because people don't believe it otherwise.
Dr. Todd had the same experience with a countertop ice maker. Black material building up inside, even running filtered water through it. Once he switched to distilled, the cleaning dropped off and the machine lasted longer.
He also had a client who was a water engineer in Salt Lake City, a man who inspected municipal systems for a living. That man ran four filters at home and told Dr. Todd he would never drink municipal water. When the person who inspects the system won't drink from it, that's worth hearing.
And the labels don't help you. A bottle that says "purified water" means about as much as a box that says "all natural."
A real case: the family whose symptoms were coming out of the tap
Dr. Todd shared a story on the episode about one of his colleagues who moved to the Puerto Rico area. The water there was supposed to be good.
Then the daughter started having stomach aches. The colleague developed redness in his skin. His wife had ear congestion that dragged on for a year and a half. They tried everything, including antibiotics from a neighbor who was an urgent care doctor and owned several clinics. Nothing worked.
Dr. Todd told him early on that it was the water. Six months later, nothing had changed. The man was running a Berkey and vortexing the water, and assumed that covered it. When they finally switched to distilled water, the daughter's stomach aches resolved. The father's skin cleared. The wife's ear congestion, after eighteen months, cleared roughly a month later.
The reason mattered. Waste disposal sites in the area hadn't been lined properly, and Legionella was reaching the water supply. A quality filter that wasn't distillation didn't catch it.
Three people. Three unrelated-looking complaints. One shared exposure, poured into glasses every day.
What I recommend for your water
Start clean. That's the whole principle. Whatever you want to do afterward, remineralize it, structure it, hydrogenate it, you do that to clean water, not to contaminated water.
I drink distilled and add electrolytes back in. Distillation heats water to a gas state, cools it, and condenses it back. Rain is nature doing the same thing. Medical devices specify distilled for a reason.
The common objection is that you've stripped the minerals out and created dead water. So I ask people: are you telling me tap water contains the minerals your body needs? It doesn't. If distilled water were disqualifying for that reason, and tap water lacks them too, the whole population would already be mineral deficient.
The minerals your body can use are organic and carbon bound. You find them in fruit, vegetables, and meat. The inorganic kind is what leaves white deposits on your windows. A quality fulvic humic can add trace minerals back, and the one you want disperses through the water instead of sinking to the bottom. Source and extraction method matter enormously there.
Where to start this week
If you've been chasing symptoms for years, doing the diets, running the cleanses, and still feel like something is underneath it all, look at the thing you consume more than anything else. You drink it, you cook with it, you shower in it.
Your microbiome has lived alongside humans for a very long time. It has never encountered the chemicals we've put into the water in the last century. Ask what is allowing the problem to stay, not just what the problem is called.
Clean water is not the whole answer. It's the floor you build everything else on.
If you've been told your labs look perfect while your body keeps telling you otherwise, I want to hear about it. What symptom have you been carrying that nobody could explain, and has anyone ever asked you what's in your water?
This blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared here reflects Dr. Jaban's clinical perspectives and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.