Tap water is ‘terrible’ claims urine-drinking adventurer Bear Grylls
Once, when a bit thirsty in the desert, Bear Grylls cut open a camel and drank from its rumen. When on a beach, he advised slurping from the eyes of a parrotfish to stay hydrated.
If camels or parrotfish were not available, the explorer had a fallback option in another survival show. “It’s about digging deep and doing the unimaginable,” he explained, before — with all the gusto of an actor in an Evian advert — he glugged back a bottle of his own urine.
However, there is one method of hydration of which even the former chief Scout is wary: tap water. “The long-term health effect of poor quality tap water is horrendous,” he said, while promoting a water filtration company. Speaking to The Times he added that while UK tap water was relatively good, “it’s still terrible”.
Grylls said he was worried about the contaminants and chemicals used in treating water
Grylls’s remarks have angered Britain’s Drinking Water Inspectorate. “Public supply drinking water quality in England and Wales is excellent,” a spokesperson said, adding: “Consumers should have confidence in their drinking water.” The DWI said that, unlike with bodily fluids, “there is no disease burden associated with drinking water”.
Grylls, who once sated his thirst by squeezing the juice out of elephant dung and slurping it down, made the comments while working with Water2 — a UK company that sells £129 filters that has previously got itself in hot water after being sanctioned by the Advertising Standards Authority.
He said that he was worried about the contaminants and chemicals used in treating water. “It’s universally acknowledged chlorine is going to kill bacteria and parasites, but it’s not going to be good for your health,” added the TV star, who also has concerns about fluoride, microplastics and lead.
Peter Jarvis, a professor of water science and technology at Cranfield University, has never sliced open a camel rumen to hydrate himself but said that the claims made by Water2 were “misleading and exaggerated”.
“We do not want people to think that tap water is unsafe to drink … the UK consistently is in the top five in the world.
“Where chemicals are added to tap water, this is always done to ensure the safety of the water, and using levels that are safe to drink, with significant margins of error factored in, so there is no real need to filter these out. The benefits of adding chlorine to tap water significantly outweigh any of the often unproven negatives.”
Grylls has been promoting a water filter with Water2
While people whose homes have lead pipes might consider a filter, he said, when it came to microplastics, levels were already very low. “You are far more likely to be exposed to microplastics from food or from particles in the air landing on your glass of water on the table.”
Water2 also cited concerns about the effect of so-called hormone-mimicking “forever chemicals” in drinking water, which was the subject of a Royal Society of Chemistry report that advised the government to tighten up standards. That has now been done. Of almost 50,000 tap water samples taken by the DWI last year, fewer than 2 per cent had any detectable contamination from the chemicals.
Still, if that doesn’t convince you, then there is another option available for those who cannot afford a home filtration system.
When faced with a puddle of foetid water polluted by bird dung, even Grylls balked at drinking it directly. So he did the only sensible thing. He gave himself an enema and absorbed it through nature’s own filtration system: his colon.