Drinking pure H2O isn’t good for you. As far as I know it could even be deadly. But what if you had a pill with all the minerals usually dissolved in water and washed it down with a nice big glass of distilled water? Would it be more or less the same as drinking tap water? Or would you need more time to dissolve the minerals? What if you threw the pill into the H2O and stirred?
Or am I missing something entirely? I think someone on Lemmy even explained to me the other day what is so bad about distilled water. But I’m stupid today and forgot.
The vast majority of the minerals that your body obtains are from food and drink. The danger of drinking distilled water (due to the lack of mineral content) is very overblown. And the osmotic pressure of tap water is essentially the same as distilled water.
Distilled water is fine unless you are not eating food. Which means you’ll die eventually anyway. Plenty of minerals in solid food.
Distilled water isn’t bad for you - it’s just lacking in a lot of nutrients you’d usually get from “normie” water. It’s still better for you than soda or juices.
Do you have an aversion to tap water? Britas and Berkeys are options if you’re concerned about taste or chemicals respectively.
Since you pee out electrolytes along with water, drinking too much distilled water has the effect of washing out electrolytes from your body.
Do you have an aversion to tap water? Britas and Berkeys are options if you’re concerned about taste or chemicals respectively.
Nah, I don’t want to really do this. Seems pretty stupid to me. I was just wondering while I poured some distilled water into my CPAP device.
Now seeing all the answers I’ve got to experience what it tastes like.
Edit: Just tried it, tasted like regular water.
RIP
there’s no data that says drinking distilled water is bad for you. if half of a grain of salt would make that water no longer distilled, the leftover minerals in your mouth from the last thing you ate are going to make it no longer distilled
Distilled water shouldn’t be bad at all.
It shouldn’t be your only source of water though.
Distilled water isn’t bad for you in moderation, but electrolytes and other solutes which are present in impure water are important in maintaining cellular homeostasis, so you’d want to drink standard water on the side. Dissolving electrolytes into distilled water just means that you’ll have extra clean normal water. Fun fact, Coca Cola and other soft drinks use distilled water!
electrolytes and other solutes which are present in impure water are important in maintaining cellular homeostasis
But they’re barely present. Adding up the common ones, calcium, sodium, magnesium doesn’t even get you to 100mg per liter. Meanwhile, the body needs at least 1000mg of calcium, which is 30 liters worth.
As one might expect, water simply isn’t a big source of nutrients. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something, probably either bottled water, or mineral-powder to add to osmotic filters.
I have an elderly neighbour who is a little on the paranoid side and believed that fluoride in the water was going to poison him. He ended up buying a distiller, and he started to only drink distilled water. He became very sick and had go to to the hospital where he was diagnosed with hyponatremia. Essentially, if you drink too much distilled water it’ll flush out the sodium and other minerals in your body causing cells to expand and burst due to the osmotic pressure. If someone is drinking distilled water it’s important that they watch their electrolyte intake. Drinking too much water in general can lead to hyponatremia, but it can happen more easily with distilled water since it’s as hypotonic as it gets.
It’s really the same thing. Tapwater contains barely any sodium, and the average western person had a harder time bringing down their dietary sodium than keeping it up.
Tapwater contains some 40mg of sodium per liter, one single slice of bread contains some 200mg, at least.
People seem to be misunderstanding things here and misconstruing that distilled water being bad in large amounts due to it lacking electrolytes implies that we get a significant portion of sodium from water.
It isn’t about not getting enough sodium from water intake (as others have said, the amount of sodium in normal water is tiny), but more to do with the fact that distilled water has no solutes and is very “eager” to suck up any solutes it encounters. If you are only drinking distilled water (or are drinking large amounts of it quickly) it’s going to easily flush out the electrolytes already present in your body regardless of your diet. These electrolytes inside of the body are important for cellular homeostasis.
With a solvent such as water even a little amount of dissolved solutes are going to change how the solution as a whole behaves. The small amount of solutes in normal water means that normal water is less “hungry” for solutes compared to distilled water. I’m bad at explaining things but the gist is it’s less about nutrition and more to do with physics. Cells in the body are sensitive to changes in osmotic pressure. If there’s less electrolytes outside the cell compared to inside, the cells will swell and burst. If there’s more electrolytes outside the cell compared to inside, the cell will shrivel up. There has to be a perfect balance.
https://facty.com/lifestyle/wellness/should-my-family-drink-distilled-water/
This paper by the WHO goes into more detail under “Health Risks Of Drinking Demineralized Water” on page 148. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/43403/9241593989_eng.pdf?sequence=1
I’m a chemist, not a biologist, so I’m a bit fuzzy on stuff like cells. But I can do basic maths (and obviously chemistry) and I have Google.
If you are only drinking distilled water it’s going to flush out the electrolytes already present in your body.
The difference in sodium between tapwater and distilled water is 40mg per liter. So at most, drinking a liter of distilled water you’re going to lose 40mg of sodium more than with tapwater.
Your blood contains 140ish mmol of sodium per liter. At 26 grams per mole, that’s 3650mg/liter. The difference between blood and tapwater is already huge, which is why you can easily get hyponatremia from drinking regular tap- or mineralwater (as you showed in your link). Whether it’s a difference of 3610mg/l or 3650mg/l doesn’t matter at all, the gradient is already very steep with normal water.
The other very obvious bit of evidence are the thousands of people on ocean-going ships who drink water from reverse-osmosis filters, which is basically completely mineral-free too.
Does your neighbor just not eat or something? The overwhelming majority of electrolytes and minerals come from food, not drinking water. He’d have to fast for a pretty long time before distilled water could remove enough salt to cause hyponatremia.
https://jacksonspringswater.com/media/2016/4/18/health-risks-of-demineralized-water
Hyponatremia is not typically caused by eating a low sodium diet. It’s typically caused by sodium already in your body being flushed out by water. Since distilled water has no solutes in it, it’s more “hungry” for solutes compared to normal water, so the flushing effect is worse. It has nothing to do with not getting enough electrolytes from water it’s more to do with the physics of osmosis. A solvent containing no solutes is going to more easily “suck up” solutes (in this case sodium and other minerals) and flush them out.
Pure water can actually dissolve metal:
https://www.businessinsider.com/super-kamiokande-neutrino-detector-is-unbelievably-beautiful-2018-6
https://physicsandphysicists.blogspot.com/2018/06/super-kamiokande-and-extremly-pure-water.html
Your first link doesn’t mention distilled (or demineralized) water at all.
Your second link is an advertisement for mineral water.
Your third and fourth links have nothing to do with hyponatremia.
Yes, a solvent with no solutes is going to exert more osmotic pressure than a solvent containing solutes. I am not disputing that.
What I am disputing is the idea that there is a biologically relevant difference. The human body contains 42 liters of “solvent” with 6000mg of “solutes” per liter. The difference in concentration after adding a liter of tap water vs distilled water is a tiny, tiny fraction of the difference between the upper and lower levels of normal.
No, this is a purely theoretical risk. In practical terms, anyone suffering from hyponatremia while consuming distilled water would also be suffering from hyponatremia if they had been consuming tap water instead.
The first link was in response to someone implying that hyponatremia is caused by not consuming enough electrolytes in food. The link that I provided said that hyponatremia is more closely related to how much fluid is in your body rather than not getting enough sodium in your diet.
The second link outlines the health risks of demineralized water.
The third and fourth links concern the fact that pure water behaves differently to normal water.
The World Health Organization has a paper which goes into detail regarding the health risks of demineralized water starting from page 148.
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/43403/9241593989_eng.pdf?sequence=1
The first link was in response to someone implying that hyponatremia is caused by not consuming enough electrolytes in food
No, that was not my implication at all. My implication was that the amount of electrolytes we consume in tap water is miniscule. So little comes from water that even if we were to completely eliminate that source by switching to distilled water, we would not significantly affect the levels in our bodies.
The second link outlines the health risks of demineralized water.
The second link is a fucking ad. It was written by people who majored in sales and marketing, not science or medicine. It’s shit. I’m not going to pick through that cow patty for the few kernels of truth that might be hiding, and I promise you, I won’t find them very appealing after you do the picking.
Your latest link does, indeed, list some health concerns about demineralized water, relating primarily to calcium and magnesium. Where diets are already deficient in these minerals (and thus the trace amounts in water are a high percentage of total intake), switching to distilled water would, indeed, contribute to such deficiency. This is irrelevant if your diet has sufficient calcium and magnesium.
It also suggests that demineralized water can leech toxic heavy metals from plumbing systems, as we saw in Flint, MI, when they switched from a hard water source to a softened water source. This is irrelevant if your plumbing source does not contain toxic metals.
Notably missing from those health risks is “hyponatremia”. I found 9 references to hyponatremia in that paper, and none of them suggest that distilled or demineralized water poses a significant risk over tap water.
However, your link also confirms my argument, on page 43:
The relative of contribution of water to total dietary intake of selected trace elements and electrolytes is between 1 and 20%.
The overwhelming source of electrolytes and minerals in the body is from food, not water. Since we do not acquire a significant portion of electrolytes from water, the lack of electrolytes in distilled water is not an important consideration.
That homeostasis is important. You would always bloat up the cells in mouth, throat and gut a tiny bit.
So dissolve the minerals before drinking, thats better
I found a short paper in the NIH library since most sources seem to be from water companies.
Other than the water will taste like it’s missing something, because it is, there doesn’t seem to be any conclusive proof of harm. Calcium and magnesium seemed to be the 2 main things people in even industrialized nations may be short on in their diet that they could benefit from having in their water.
The one thing I did find of interest from the paper was this:
This processed water has no residual chlorine and stored or dispensed in PVC can/bottles provides no protection against probable microbial contamination due to handling which is taken care of in conventional system of water supply having free residual chlorine.
So when you dispense it after distillation, it is more prone to some forms of contamination that treated water.
I’m not sure the purpose of removing minerals to just add them back in. You would have to figure out the “blend” you prefer, and the supplement industry is not free from controversy, so being positive what you’re reintroducing to the water is now a question. With tap water, you should be able to get a report of it’s composition from your water company.
This is almost literally the process Coca-Cola uses for its Smartwater brand. People outside Coca-Cola have described the process of removing everything then adding it back as dumb though. I wonder why
There is nothing wrong with drinking distilled water except it’ll taste bad.
Distilled water shouldn’t have a taste.
I just tried it. It tasted just like regular water to me.
Yeah. Distilled water isn’t the same as lab grade deionized water.
I think this would be fine. But the mineral content of that glass of natural water is probably tiny, so the pill would be mostly filler.
My HS chemistry teacher was adamant that distilled water could pull filings out of your teeth. No idea if that’s true or not, I doubt she is still alive to ask.
She died in the name of science.
Drinking pure H2O isn’t good for you. As far as I know it could even be deadly.
Tell me more please
Edit: [email protected] answered thanks
Distilled water is fine for you. Otherwise big gov would be telling you to pack up vitamins/minerals for emergencies (they do anyways, but not because of distilled water worries).
I don’t see why not, though I don’t know why you would - distilled water tastes blek. Not as bad as bitter-ass unflavored seltzer water though.
No it doesn’t. It tastes like regular ass water. Not like regular ass-water.
Making an important distinction, my friend.
Why do people drink distilled water? I get that there’s some taste from the minerals, but I live in a place with hard water and it tastes fine. I’ve had fancy bottled water and that tastes the exact same if not worse, I drank distilled water and that basically tastes the same too.
I’ve only heard of people drinking it when they’re on a life raft in the middle of the ocean. Is there a new trend I’m unaware of?
Most bottled water comes from a municipal water system somewhere, i.e., is tap water.
Some water supplies have issues with sulfur or algae, so that can be unpleasant if your sense of smell is particularly sensitive. My sense of smell is pretty weak so I drink the tap water most places, while my spouse had an RO system installed in our house due to their sensitivity.
