Quote
Sambaqui
I am doing my best to follow Steve Carr’s approach to AF and have reduced the calcium in my diet to around the 400 mg a day mark. However, I have just discovered that the drinking water that comes from my tap (I live in London, UK) has a calcium carbonate content of 273 mg per litre. Since we are encouraged to drink at least two litres of water a day (particularly if we have AF) this makes any attempt to keep calcium down to 400 mg an impossible task. Does anyone else live in a hard water area?
To your question, I believe both reverse osmosis and distillation will remove minerals. I think there can be an issue with drinking water without minerals for an extended period, so if you go this route, you may want to investigate proper remineralization.
If 273 mg/L is the calcium carbonate, calcium is approximately 40% of the compound or 109 mg Ca/L.
The late Erling Waller, who was a member here till he passed at age 91 in Dec 2020, posted about this here [
www.afibbers.org] (He posted about calcium a lot, here is a
search. From his post, the Denver, CO, US water, where was living, was about 1/3 what you've described for the London water.
Erling's solution was to develop a magnesium bicarbonate water
recipe.
Erling, posting as Anonymous User, described the process of developing this water
here.
Poster GHG started using magnesium acetate. He says that the acetate will convert to bicarb in the body. He has many posts in this
thread. In the linked post, he links a
pdf with a lot of info on magnesium & mag acetate. One way he's suggested is to take milk of magnesia (water and magnesium hydroxide) and mix it with vinegar in a 2 :7 (MoM:water) ratio. I've done this with both the liquid MoM and powdered magnesium hydroxide. I use organic apple cider vinegar if I consume magnesium in this form.
I live in the same area as Erling, but have not tried to remove calcium from my water. I do consume copious quantities of magnesium and limit calcium intake in my food.