Paid advertisements constructed to look like articles are an old marketing tactic.
Life Straw beats nothing, but there are better water filters out there, the Sawyer Mini, Frontier Pro and MSR for examples.
LifeStraw:
http://www.buylifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-personal
Sawyer Mini:
http://sawyer.com/products/sawyer-mini-filter/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7OcF8w0avE
Big issue if you were to use the LifeStraw, how would you fill up your cooking pot with clean water? suck water through the straw and spit it out into your cooking pot? This assumes that you don't want to burn extra fuel to boil your cooking water to clean it.
Sawyer Mini allows for inline usage, gravity filtering in camp, as well as using it like the life straw. Flexibility in usage goes way beyond the safely of filtering the water more effectively with smaller pore sizes. Plus, the Mini is field cleanable….I did not see anything on the LifeStraw website for field cleaning.
LifeStraw was designed to be a disposable product to aid/save people in 3rd world countries from waterborne diseases and created a commercial product as an outgrowth of that endeavor.
The Sawyer Mini was designed with the backpacker, camper, recreational person in mind.
YouTube linked above compares several of the filters.