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I recently had to make a decision on which sort of water treatment system to get for my drinking water, and I found this booklet useful. The author argues in favor of drinking carbon filtered water rather than purified (demineralized) water. The fact that he provides citations for most of his claims, often to articles in high-profile medical and scientific journals, adds weight to his arguments. His descriptions of studies comparing the cardiovascular health of communities drinking soft water versus those drinking hard water were particularly interesting.
The material on chlorination and fluoridation were also interesting, though I was already familiar with much of what he wrote about fluoride. Something I feel the author didn't address adequately was the issue of what one should do if one lives in a fluoridated community, or a community which just has an unacceptably high level of naturally-occurring fluoride in the water; in that situation, is it perhaps not better to use a water distiller, since carbon filters are incapable of reliably removing fluoride? His answer is to use a special fluoride filter (presumably an activated alumina filter, though he doesn't say), along with some unsubstantiated claims to the effect that the hardness and TDS (total dissolved solids) in water somehow help to neutralize the effects of fluoride. The problem with this advice is that fluoride filters designed for home use aren't necessarily all that effective, and the hardness of the water in some parts of India didn't prevent the people in those areas from developing crippling skeletal fluorosis from the high levels of fluoride which were also contained in their drinking water.
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