Quick! Get the Lysol!

Anyone else think this whole filtering and disinfecting everything is getting out of hand?

The TV was on while I was on the computer and it went like this:

Infomerical for an air-filter – Explaining just how ‘dangerous’ it is to breathe.

Ad for a disinfectant spray – Explaining how everyone you care about it going to die unless you spray everything down once an hour.

Infomerical for a water purifier – Explaining how drinking tap water is going to give you a nasty disease.

Now, as timing would have it (and just to be clear) my mother-in-law gave us a really good air-filter today as an early Christmas present. I have to say I love the thing, but that’s because we have a dog and I smoke. I don’t really care about ‘allergens’ in the air…it just makes out living room smell nicer.

The thing is, you have to expose your immune system to the bad stuff in order to strengthen it. When you get ill your body learns how to fight that virus or infection, which helps you fight it off more easily next time.

Long story short, if you lived in a totally sterile room throughout your entire life, you’d have no immune system…and if you went outside, getting a cold or the flu would probably kill you, or best case scenario, a disease that would just slow a normal person down a little would knock you on your ass for weeks.

So, if you have a kid that you only let breathe filtered air, drink filtered water and spray everything they touch with disinfectant every day…good luck on his first day of school.

However, what bugs me the most about these infomercials though, is just how full of shit they are.

The one for the water filer showed how their filter reduced ‘harmful’ ingredients to just 4 parts per million….then pointed out that even bottled water was ‘massively’ contaminated with 170 parts per million of harmful stuff.

Wow, 170 parts down to 4? That’s massive right?

Well, no.

If you look at it as a percentage, the 4 parts per million is 0.0004% contaminated versus 0.017%.

Let’s face it “170 parts” sounds like a big number…but we’re still only talking less than a 100^th of a percent.

Oh, and that’s just how much ‘stuff’ is in the water. Not ‘harmful’ stuff, but just things like minerals that you find in water anyway.

I’ve also seen an infomercial about an air filter were they ‘demonstrated’ what you breathe in by washing off a filter and then showed the dirty water. Then the presenter douchebag held it up to the camera and said “Would you drink that?”

Well, probably not…but that’s a half pint of water holding all the dust and airborne particles that it would probably take me a month or so to breathe in normally. It’s the difference between living within a mile of a major highway and connecting and oxygen mask to your car’s exhaust pipe.

Long story short, a water filter will make your water taste a bit better, an air filter will make your house smell fresher and disinfecting everything in your home is useless unless you plan on living like the bubble-boy. ‘Health Benefits’ my ass.