I'm sure you'll find gold water bottles are even better. As for
"unspecified health benefits," does anything make less sense than the
reasoning behind homeopathy? And yet, look how popular it is.
On 11/13/2015 05:25 PM, Peter Adler wrote:
Why am I not surprised that a bike retailer in Portland is carrying
copper water bottles for large money, and spreading claptrap about
unspecified health benefits? Has *Portlandia* become a documentary?
Copper was one of the first metals used by humans, after gold. Neither
of them were used because of any virtues as elements; they were used
because they were easy to work: low melting temperatures (easily
reached by wood fires) and soft (workable with stone tools). Plus: Shiny!
People have been making cooking vessels out of copper for as long as
they've been working copper, but raw copper was rapidly replaced by
copper alloys (bronze and brass) and by raw copper pots lined with
tin. Although copper is an excellent heat conductor, it is also highly
reactive, especially with acids. It puts nasty poisonous stuff into
your food.
There are unlined copper food vessels, but they're all for very
limited food exposure. The primary ones are copper bowls for whipping
cream or egg whites; the chemical reaction between the liquids and the
copper gets the whipped cream/egg whites stiffer faster. Unlined
copper is also used for high-quality plumbing, because copper is
antibacterial. But the water isn't supposed to sit around in the pipes
forever.
You need dietary copper. But all the copper you need is in your diet.
It is perfectly possible to overdose on ingested copper (especially if
the container has developed that decorative green verdigris), in which
case the symptoms are quite nasty: Cirrhosis, kidney failure,
Alzheimers, low blood pressure, brain necrosis. As a counter to the
Ayurvedic claim (shhhhhyeah, right), let's note that there's a
condition called "Indian childhood cirrhosis" (i.e., cirrhosis in kids
who aren't old enough to have bashed their livers in with alcohol);
this condition has been linked to boiling milk in unlined copper
cookware. Call me a Western medicine bigot; but if Indian moms have
been cooking milk in copper pots for centuries, watching their kids
get sick, and not putting two and two together, then it's hard to
appreciate the diagnostic rigor of of Ayurvedic medical practice.
I am a big fan of copper decorative items. Wilier Triestina's copper
/chromovelato/ is a stunning color. I've got copper bike tchotchkes of
all sorts, including a plated copper travel mug that makes it onto the
bike fairly often, and the copper version of the Crane Karen bell
(actually copper-plated aluminum: more expensive and cheesier-sounding
than the brass bell. If anyone's got the solid copper bell Jitensha
used to stock and they're willing to sell it, let me know). I have
actively fantasized about copper-anodizing a set of centerpull brakes
to mount on my dark green Raleigh, for the *City of Lost Children*
look. But aesthetics shouldn't be a suicide attempt; I wouldn't use
copper in ways that endager my safety or impair my health. I wouldn't
carry my water in unlined copper, just as I wouldn't have brakes made
out of solid copper. No matter how pretty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Folk_medicine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_toxicity
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW
Owners Bunch" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
