Why does my Brita water pitcher say to discard the first three pitcher fulls of water before using it?

I just checked my package of filters, and it says discard the first 2 pitchers of water or use it on plants due to carbon dust from the filter. I have never done this, and I’ve never had an adverse reaction to the water.

The filter contains loose charcoal that needs to be washed away. Drinking the stuff that first time probably won’t hurt you (unless you were highly alergic to charcol), but Brita has to post that advisory in order to legally cover itself.

If you were a paranoid conspiracy nut, you would say that they are trying to make you use up the filtering capabilities faster so that you will buy more filters before you need to. In otherwords, planned obsolescence that you help along.

But the real reason is that they want you to wash away any impurities. Dust, or whatever. Probably wouldn’t hurt you even if you swallowed it, but they are covering their legal butts just in case you had some allergic reaction.

Maybe they don’t want you drinking the first pitcher full, and sending it back to them because the water was too gritty and nasty tasting. So they tested in a lab how many times you could be guaranteed not to get the gritty crap in the water and then suggested that.

See above.
The first few runs through the filter carry some of the little charcoal fragments. They won’t hurt you. They just don’t look good in the pitcher.

They give liquid charcoal to clean out your stomach at hospitals.

When I first found out I had Celiacs charcoal pills were the thing to take in case of gluten contamination or a reaction.

Basically what it does is absorb contents in your stomach and speed up the process of getting rid of them.

However to get this type of reaction one would need a lot more charcoal then what little you get in the first couple of pitcherfuls even if you did drink it all in one sitting.