What to filter when there's a baby in the house.
If you're already reading labels and asking questions, you're not alone. This is a plain-English guide to what pediatric authorities recommend filtering for babies and young children — with the lab data on what gets removed.
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If you're reading this, you've already started thinking about it. That's not paranoia. That's parenting.
You don't have to take our word for anything. The CDC, EPA, and American Academy of Pediatrics all name the same short list of contaminants worth filtering for a baby — and all three name the same NSF/ANSI standards used to test for them. We just built a pitcher that passes those tests.
Every removal percentage on this page comes from independent third-party lab testing against the cited NSF/ANSI standard. No marketing math. No proprietary scoring.
Pure XP's cartridge is a single sealed core built from world-class filter media tuned to a different family of contaminants. Tap water comes in the top, exits the bottom, and what's left in between is the difference.
The windows where filtration has the largest health upside are also the windows where a baby's exposure looks nothing like an adult's.
PFAS and lead cross the placenta. What the parent drinks, the fetus drinks. Filtration begins before birth.
Formula prep. Infants on formula consume their entire fluid intake reconstituted from tap water.
First solids cooked or rinsed in tap water. Sippy cups arrive. Per-pound intake is highest of life.
Sippy cups, school cups, snack ice. The body's most water-heavy decade — by ounce-per-pound.
The number one priority every pediatric authority names — and the test we'd want any filter we bought to pass.
Lead is the contaminant pediatric authorities prioritize above all others. Even low-level exposure during the first three years can affect cognitive development, and the effects don't reverse. Children absorb roughly four to five times more ingested lead than adults — and they drink more water per pound of body weight.
Lead almost never comes from the source. It leaches in from lead service lines, lead solder, and brass fittings between the main and your tap. Utility-side compliance numbers can look fine while your home's water tests high. Hot water leaches more — which is why every authority recommends cold tap for formula.
Source: U.S. EPA — Basic Information about Lead in Drinking Water. CDC — Lead in Drinking Water. AAP — Lead Exposure in Children policy statement.
The contaminant the EPA finalized a federal limit on in 2024 — at four parts per trillion.
PFAS accumulate. They build up in human blood and tissue over years because the molecules are engineered not to degrade. They cross the placenta during pregnancy and pass through breast milk after birth. The EPA's 2024 rule sets the legal limit at four parts per trillion because no safe exposure level has been identified.
PFAS contamination is a legacy of industrial sites, military bases, firefighting foam runoff, and the manufacture of non-stick coatings and stain-resistant fabrics. The EPA's nationwide testing found measurable PFAS in roughly half of U.S. public water systems. Boiling concentrates PFAS — it does not remove them.
Source: U.S. EPA — PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (April 2024). EPA Method 537.1 for PFAS quantification.
A contaminant we didn't know to test for a decade ago — and that's now been found in every U.S. tap-water sample studied.
Microplastics — and the much smaller nanoplastics — carry the chemical signatures of the products they came from: plasticizers, flame retardants, dye stabilizers. Recent peer-reviewed work has found them in placental tissue and infant stool. The long-term health implications are still being studied; the precautionary case for filtering them is straightforward.
Plastic pollution in waterways, plastic distribution pipes, and the breakdown of textiles and tires all release particles small enough to pass through municipal treatment. Bottled water is not a fix — multiple peer-reviewed studies have found higher microplastic counts in bottled water than in equivalently-treated tap.
Source: Orb Media tap-water study (2017). State University of New York at Fredonia bottled-water analysis. Peer-reviewed work on placental microplastic accumulation, Environment International (2021).
The disinfection byproducts that show up when chlorine reacts with the organic matter already in the source water.
Trihalomethanes — chloroform, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane, bromoform — are the unavoidable byproducts of disinfecting drinking water with chlorine. The EPA classifies several as probable human carcinogens. The federal limit was set in 1979 and has not been revised; the research community broadly considers it higher than where it would be set today.
Chlorine disinfection is non-negotiable for municipal water — it's what keeps waterborne illness rare. THMs are the trade-off. They form between the treatment plant and your tap, which is why even utilities in full compliance with the legal limit can produce water that benefits from a point-of-use carbon filter.
Source: U.S. EPA — Stage 2 Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts Rule. NSF International — Standard 53 trihalomethane reduction claim.
Pure XP runs in the background of your day. Between the morning bottle, the afternoon snack, and the cup left on the nightstand — the work of clean water is invisible by design.
Lead, PFAS, microplastics, and trihalomethanes — independently tested against the standards the EPA names. One pitcher. One cartridge every three months.
Lead, PFAS, microplastics, and trihalomethanes — independently tested against the standards the EPA names. One pitcher. One cartridge every three months.
We surveyed thousands of families. These are the answers we kept hearing — and what we built the cartridge to deliver against.
Lead and trihalomethane reductions tested against NSF/ANSI Standard 53. PFAS tested against P473. Not a proprietary in-house test — the public standard the federal agency points to.
Roughly three to four months between replacements at typical household use. Subscribe and the next arrives before you run out.
Pitcher, lid, reservoir, and cartridge housing all built from medical-grade Tritan plastic. Tested for migration — the test that matters when water sits in the pitcher overnight.
Sits on a counter, in a fridge, in a diaper bag drop zone. Filtered water becomes the path of least resistance from day one.
Filters made in the USA at our own vertically-integrated facility.
If it doesn't fit your family's routine, send it back. We'd rather you switch to something that does than keep a pitcher you never use.
We surveyed thousands of families to understand what they wanted from a filter. These are the metrics that mattered — and the lab results that back them up.
We surveyed our customers and asked them why they switched. Seventy-one percent said the same thing — they wanted to protect their family. So we built Pure XP around that.
"We surveyed our customers and asked them why they switched. Seventy-one percent said the same thing — they wanted to protect their family. So we built Pure XP around that."— Epic Water Filters team
If your home has — or might have — lead service lines or lead-soldered plumbing, the AAP and CDC both recommend using cold tap water run through a filter certified for lead reduction (NSF/ANSI Standard 53) to mix formula. Hot tap water leaches more lead from older plumbing, which is why every guideline specifies cold.
If your home was built after 1986 and uses copper or PEX, the case is softer but still defensible — PFAS, trihalomethanes, and chlorine are all reasons families filter regardless of plumbing age.
Boiling kills microbes — bacteria, viruses, parasites. It does not remove lead, PFAS, microplastics, or trihalomethanes. In fact, boiling concentrates them, because water evaporates and the contaminants don't.
A boil-water advisory is a different situation, and you should follow your utility's guidance during one. For everyday formula prep, filtration is what removes the contaminants the boil cannot.
Several contaminants worth filtering — including PFAS and lead — cross the placenta. Public-health guidance for pregnancy is similar to guidance for infancy: a filter certified to the relevant NSF/ANSI standards is a reasonable, low-effort intervention. If you have specific concerns, your prenatal care provider can review your home's water report with you.
The AAP advises against giving water at all in the first six months — milk or formula provide all the hydration an infant needs. After six months, small amounts of water are introduced alongside solids. From that point on, "filtered" matters for the same reasons it matters for adults, except per-pound exposure is higher.
Translation: from before birth (formula prep) to about age five, filtration is doing more health work per ounce than at any other point in life.
Many U.S. water utilities now publish lead service line inventories — start with your provider's website. Homes built before 1986 are likelier candidates; homes built before 1950 likelier still. Inexpensive test kits and certified-laboratory mail-in kits both exist if you want a direct read on your tap.
Filtering doesn't depend on knowing — a filter certified for lead reduction protects you whether your pipes turn out to be a problem or not.
Bottled water is regulated as a packaged food by the FDA, not as tap water by the EPA — a different and in some respects less stringent framework. Independent studies of bottled brands routinely find measurable microplastic contamination, generally higher than filtered tap.
Bottled also creates the plastic waste downstream that ultimately becomes upstream contamination. The economics aren't in its favor either: a household running through a case a week spends ten to twenty times more annually than the cost of a pitcher and quarterly cartridges.
The full list runs to several pages and lives on our certification page. The headline categories: lead, PFAS (including PFOA and PFOS), microplastics down to 0.5 microns, trihalomethanes and other chlorination byproducts, chlorine taste and odor, several pharmaceutical residues, and a long list of pesticides and herbicides.
What it doesn't remove: minerals like calcium and magnesium (which are fine — and arguably beneficial — to leave in), fluoride (we don't claim fluoride reduction), and microbiological contaminants like bacteria and viruses, which require a different filtration class.
Pitchers and cartridges are both manufactured in our vertically-integrated facility in Palmetto, Florida. The filter media is sourced and blended in the same facility. Every production batch is tested before it ships; lot-level documentation is available on request.
If you've made it this far, you already know what you want to do. Shop the Pure XP pitcher — or set up a subscription so the next cartridge arrives before this one needs swapping.