What Water Experts Actually Say

Everyone has an opinion on water. Wellness accounts swear by alkaline water. Filter brands swear by whatever they happen to sell. Somewhere in the middle, actual water chemists, health agencies and environmental scientists have been publishing research for decades — most of it ignored because it doesn’t fit on a label.

Here’s what the people who actually study water are saying, without the marketing layered on top.

On minerals: keep them

The World Health Organization has looked specifically at what happens when water is stripped of its natural mineral content. Their findings aren’t subtle: demineralized water is associated with a “flat taste” and lower consumer acceptability, and the minerals naturally present in drinking water — calcium and magnesium in particular — are highly bioavailable, meaning the body absorbs them efficiently.

The conclusion from the WHO's own report isn’t that minerals are a nice-to-have. It’s that removing them is a design choice with real consequences, not a neutral act of “purification.”

On PFAS: real, but manageable

The European Environment Agency has been tracking PFAS — the long-chain “forever chemicals” — across EU water sources for years, and its findings are consistent: these substances are persistent, widespread, and not always fully addressed by conventional treatment. The EU’s Drinking Water Directive (2020/2184) has introduced group limits, and regulation is actively evolving.

What the research doesn’t support is panic. It supports activated carbon — specifically high-density carbon block — as the best-documented household method for reducing long-chain PFAS, a conclusion echoed by both the U.S. EPA’s PFAS technical fact sheet and peer-reviewed PFAS adsorption research published in ACS Environmental Science & Technology.

On reverse osmosis: effective, but blunt

RO membranes are extremely effective — so effective they remove almost everything, minerals included, while wasting several liters of water for every liter they produce. That’s exactly why the WHO research above exists: RO is often the reason water ends up demineralized in the first place.

It’s a legitimate technology for desalination and industrial use. For everyday drinking water in a region where municipal treatment already meets safety standards, the same WHO findings above are the practical argument against it: stripping out minerals the body can readily use, to re-solve a problem regulation has already addressed.

The actual expert consensus

Strip away the branding and the research cited above lands in a surprisingly simple place: reduce what’s genuinely a concern — chlorine, PFAS, trace metals, microplastics — and leave the minerals alone. Not because it sounds nice, but because that’s what the WHO, EEA, EPA and ACS sources above consistently show on taste, bioavailability and hydration.

It’s the same principle behind how PJURE’s filtration system is built: activated carbon and KDF to reduce what you don’t want, a final mineral stage to keep what you do. If you want the full layer-by-layer mechanics, they’re explained here, with the complete source list in our technical documentation.