I bought a 20 ounce bottle of Dasani water, a product of the Coca Cola Company. I noticed that one of the ingredients was salt. Salt?
Why is there salt in bottled water? I’m thirsty, I don’t want any salt. There must be a reason for this. What is it?
Salt dehydrates you, makes you thirsty, which in turn compells you to buy more Dasani, or so Coca-Cola would hope to believe.
Salt water will kill you if you drink enough, that’s why you don’t see bottled water named Agua Del Mar.
another possible reason for the salt would be electrolyte replacement. at the beginning of the summer, you’ll notice that your sweat taste very salty. As the summer goes on, you sweat just as much, but your body becomes much more adept on retaining salt.
so all that rambling leads to – you sweat, you loose salt.
kinoons is right, that is why there is also salt it Gatorade and the like.
And some water, "mineral " or otherwise, contains both mineral salts as well as sodium chloride, but may come with added salt. Vichy water, for one, has large amounts of naturally occurring minerals which make it quite salty. When I was in Russia three years ago, everyone went to the local vodka store and bought three or so bottles apiece. The next morning, after our kasha and sausages, some people were still hung over, and began foraging for water/gatorade in the local version of Spar/7-11. One girl bought something with pictures of oysters and clams on it, thinking it was just a coastal speciality. Turned out to be carbonated, purified, saltwater. She spit it a good six feet.
kinoons is correct. More to the point you need salt to retain water. If you’ve ever seen a survival kit intended for desert (or other hot weather use) they usually have salt tablets in them. If you lose enough salt (via sweating or otherwise) you could drink water till you’re floating and still dehydrate.
Gatorade has a lot of salt in it. I don’t know if this is a UL but I was told that the guy who invented Gatorade analyzed what sweat was composed of and then made Gatorade to match (figuring it must be good to put back in what you are losing). In short, Gatorade is equivalent to bottled sweat (with some added flavoring).
To elaborate on what Whack-a-mole said…
There is a very clear trend in your body that where the sodium goes, the water follows. This trend is most profoundly shown in the kidneys. That’s why those who have hypertension and congestive heart failure are told to have low sodium diets.
One thing I am not sure of, but would make sense. If your body generally will absorb all the salt it can get its hands on (it taste good for the most part for a reason) then would the water you drank at the same time also closely follow it across the walls of the small/large intestine into the blood stream?
Some Interesting replies, I have a different guess to the OP.
I’d be guessing that the water started off with Lime in it, and was run through a water softener which replaced the lime ion’s with salt ion’s. Thereby they had to list it, as they added the salt.
Just IMHO.
Dan
May I just take this opportunity to say that I think Dasani is the worst-tasting bottled water - ever?
What the heck do they do to that stuff? Faucet water tastes better. Heck, faucet water in Mexico tastes better.
Yeah, I should have said this in my OP. It’s really bad. But I didn’t know that before I bought it, and I only bought it because I was super thirsty at the time.
It sucks.
Not to mention gobs of caffiene, too. IIRC, in substantially higher concentrations than coffee. A little counterproductive when you’re trying to rehydrate yourself.
I have to laugh every time I see “Dasani” because I always read it as “dasanAi” which is a slangy Japanese term, I don’t quite know how to translate it other than “it sucks.”
Hoooo, boy. So much to 'splain here, where do I want to start? I guess with the OP: Why is there salt in Dasani? Because they couldn’t remove it all. But the level is so low, I wonder why they have to mention it.
I’m looking at my own 20 oz. Dasani and I’m actually quite surprised at how much information is on the label. In the box of Nutrition Facts, we see first off that they claim 0mg of sodium per 8 oz. serving. Misleading? Sort of. It seems customary for the Nutrition Facts to be reported with 1.5 significant digits, so they could actually have say, 0.44 mg sodium per 8 oz. and be allowed to round it down to zero. Then the whole bottle could contain 1.3 mg of sodium and still be telling the truth. Even then, that makes the sodium concentration roughly 2 parts per million. That’s not a lot. Compare that to Diet Coke, a beverage labeled “VERY LOW SODIUM” whose concentration is on the order of 110 ppm, and sea water on the order or 30,000 ppm.
Dasani’s sodium levels are far too low to consider using it for electrolyte replacement. The Recomended Daily Value for sodium is a whopping 2000mg (based on a 2000 calorie diet of course).
The other minerals listed are magnesium sulfate and potassium chloride. Like the sodium above, they probably were already present in the water as it was taken from the source, be it a mountain stream, a natural spring or a “deep well” in the parking lot behind the bottling plant. The label describes the water as being filtered by reverse osmosis. RO treatment can typically remove 95-99% of the dissolved salts in solution, so the MgSO4 and KCl may just be what is left. However, they could have been added since magnesium will give the water some hardness which may have been desireable from a taste standpoint. Actually, now I’m inclined to think they were added since i find the label states “Enhanced with minerals for a pure, fresh taste.”
You’re talking about osmosis. Water can and does pass quite freely through cell membranes. The insides of cells tend to have a much higher solute concentration than the surrounding blood (or interstitial fluid) and water gushes in to try and equilibrate the cell’s internal solute concentration with the solute concentration of its surroundings. However, the cell would rupture long before equilibrium is reached, so cells spend a lot of energy actively pumping water out in order to maintain their relatively high solute concentrations.
Actually, Gatorade contains no caffeine.