While studying the healthiest way to keep my (MANY) pets, I’ve been told by several people that distilled water can actually be harmful.
Here’s how the story goes: In the Distilling process (which, I believe, involves evaporating water, catching the condensed droplets, and bottling them. I might be wrong, so correct me if I am.), all you’re left with is pure H2O. Water has a tendancy to absorb minerals from it’s surroundings. Er. So, when it’s consumed by a body, it can absorb the minerals from said body. So, while trying to be healthier (by drinking non-polluted water), the body’s actually loosing minerals.
So, Truth, or Urban Legend? Does anyone know of any studies that have been done to prove or disprove this?
(If anyone’s wondering, this info came up in a discussion on how to prevent mineral deposits on glass from misting snake cages. True, it doesn’t leave mineral deposits.)
That’s rot. Drinking distilled water is not worse for you than drinking any other sort of potable water. Filtered water can be pretty low in dissolved minerals, depending on the filtration process used. And rainwater (which is produced by an identical process to distillation, only on a much larger scale) is nearly pure water, expect for whatever dissolved gasses and pollutants it picks up on the way down.
One might
[list=1]
[li]Identify necessary minerals[/li][li]Determine solubility of said minerals[/li][li]Determine amount of said minerals in “ordinary” drinking water[/li][li]Determine average daily water intake of subjects[/li][li]Assuming (for simplicity’s sake) that urine is a saturated solution of said minerals, determine difference in mineral loss between consuming distilled water and consuming “ordinary” water[/li][li]Realize that the difference can be made up by staring hard at a plate of spinach for fifteen seconds, change one’s name, and move to another city, leaving no forwarding address.[/li][/list=1]
Alternatively, one might
[list=1]
[li]Act like the counterpart to Jack Ripper, and rave that our precious bodily fluids aren’t polluted enough.[/li][/list=1]
Your choice.
No. Your kidneys work to keep the balance of minerals and electrolytes in your body. The purity of the water you drink has no effect on this process. However, as the link to Cecil’s column says, you can drink too much water, which if done quickly enough, can dilute your electrolyte levels enough to cause death.
Some gassesmight come out of solution if the partial pressures of those dissolved gasses are higher than the partial pressures of those same gasses in the surrounding air. In the meantime, evaporation of water from the container will serve to increase the concentration of dissolved solids.
I have looked for a cite but could’nt find one so I can only offer this. Since I am a sailor and read the magazines on the subject, this came my way probably from “Cruising World”.
There are water purifiers sold for sailboats that cruise extensively. These are reverse osmosis systems. Sea water is forced thru a membrane which has Very tiny pores. So small in fact that water only passes thru by osmosis. Only water comes thru not salt, or pollutants and from what I remember reading, minerals. The magazine recommended suplimenting the resultant water with vitamin/mineral pills. Well, there you have it. I don’t know if it’s true or false.
Why doesn’t distilled water just mix with the other contents of your stomach, which should provide all the electrolytes you’d need, considering the small amounts of everything in question?
Distilled water = bad?
True!
If you are talking about taste of the water.
Pure water is tasteless; distilled water nearly so. What we recognize as “taste” in water is from the minerals in it. So this water will “taste” quite bland & insipid when you drink it.
Ianochemist, but have some experience with water, both in chemical water treatment, reverse osmosis and de-ionization.
Most people believe that water is H2O. True, but pure H2O is rarely if ever found.
H2O will NOT conduct electricity. 18.2 megohm/cm resistivity is about the purest we can get, either through RO, de-ionization and ultrafiltration.
Ordinary tap water contains many things including dissolved and suspended solids, silica, salts and other minerals, some of which contribute to conductivity. Hardness is measuerd in parts per million of calcium and magnesium.
Ultra pure or DI water at around 18 megohms is very corrosive to most common metals and will leech the minerals out of these metals (like copper, brass, and iron) until it becomes much less corrosive and loses its resistivity. Some people in the water purification industry refer to DI water as “Hungry” water.
In most DI systems the piping and valves etc. is made from high grade stainless steel, pvc, cpvc or other high purity piping material.
I’ve also heard that this water will leech the minerals out of your body if you drink it. I’ve never tried it, but I see no reason to believe it wouldn’t react to the minerals in the body any differently than it does in industry.
Keep in mind, I hi-jacked the thread a little, because DI water is much purer that distilled.
Well, there are other things besides pills which contain all the necessary minierals and salts your body needs. It’s called food. It’s how our ancestors and all living creatures have survived for millions of years without pills.
Now, if your food diet isn’t balanced, then that’s another story.
This is only when you get several megalitres of water flowing through the pipes. Humans typically do not drink megalitres of water.
If you have a look at the labels on mineral waters, you can work out exactly how much of each mineral you are losing out on by drinking distilled water. Typically, its only a few ppm of anything so you should be pretty safe.