Yes that is a fair point…
I recommend you never drink a gallon of water in one go, specially not distilled water.
So what? A sack of salt intended for use in gritting the path may be just salt, but will say it’s not for consumption. That’s about food standards more than anything.
Over the course of a day. Just replace your regular water with it. Nothing bad will happen.
I think the take out is that in most ordinary scenarios drinking demineralised water would be absolutely fine.
But there are some situations in which it could be very harmful, and also something you wouldn’t want drink regularly or try to store for drinking water without really knowing what you are doing.
That sounds fine to me. Have you ever thought of working as a mediator?
The concentration of salt in the human body is more or less the same as in seawater - somewhere between 3% and 4%.
The concentration of salt in typical tapwater is about 0.002% (and begins to be unpleasantly salty to drink if it increases to as much as 0.02%)
Or in other words, the salt concentration in your body is at least 1,500 times the salt concentration in the glass of water from the tap.
There might be reasons why drinking completely pure water may be a bad idea, but the osmotic potential difference ain’t it.
I’d bet quite a bit of money that if someone who drinks a can of coke every day substitutes a similar volume of distilled water, the net result will be beneficial to their health.
At 300 parts per million solutes (the range of the Beijing water and American tap water) we are talking 100% pure water versus 99.97% pure water.
Actually can’t help wondering if these factoids have arisen out of a divide by zero error
I have drank quite a bit of distilled water in my life - I have never noticed any adverse effects.
ETA: I once went on a solo backpacking trip and drank nothing but distilled water for 10 days straight. Other than a pretty bland taste, no ill effects.
Agreed.
The business about pure drinking water “burning your insides” is utter malarkey.
The only way drinking pure/distilled water could harm you is if you have an extremely restricted diet and the lack of minerals in the water could conceivably have an effect.
“The main risks of drinking only distilled water are linked to its lack of minerals, including magnesium and calcium…”
“Drinking distilled water will not replace minerals lost through sweat, as all additives and minerals will have been removed during the distillation process.”
“Distilled water pulls in small amounts of minerals from any material it touches, including plastics and the body (including one’s teeth). Still, if a person eats a balanced diet with the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, they should not become deficient.”
“Since most people eat and drink a variety of foods and beverages throughout the day, most people will get the salts and minerals they need from these other sources.”
There are people who overdo advice to drink plenty of water, and if they were literally chugging down gallons and gallons of distilled water daily it could lead to electrolyte problems. Overdoing tap or spring water to a similar extent might also be problematic.
Incidentally, one must not trust distilled water to be “pure”, as the distillation process could be incomplete and homeopathically speaking, the water could retain a memory of something that was in there. Best to depend only on Aqua Nova.
No, there’s nothing bad for you whatsoever about distilled water. It does carry the same caveats as regular water, of course – i.e. don’t drink gallons in a sitting, don’t store in corroded vessels, and for optimal nutrition, humans should eat some food every day.
But distilled water absolutely won’t burn any part of your body, and it won’t cause any significant nutrient depletion if drunk in comparable amounts to regular water. It has no hazards listed on MSDS sheets, it’s sold in supermarkets alongside beverages with no health or nutrition warnings whatsoever.
Frankly it’s mind-boggling that anyone would believe this.
isnt rain-water practically distilled (or at least de-mineralized) water? - since minerals will not evaporate
aren’t there people(s) living many years / centuries off off rain water? … for simplicities sake lets call really cold rain water SNOW.
I understand it will de-mineralize you in the long run, but if in a bind, empirics seem to indicate you should be ok, and maybe supplement the minerals some other way
Not being able to read the article itself, I suspect someone was exaggerating for effect, but I did find an article with at least some of the details on H2O in question.
THE WATER
It’s not just any old tap water for the Olympic curling surface.
The water for the ice is cleaned of impurities by a multi-tank reverse osmosis system; the water for the pebbling has also been de-ionized. (While good tap water might have a level of impurities at 500 parts per million, the ice for the pebbling is ideally under 4 ppm.)
It’s heated in a metal urn to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius) for the first pass and 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 Celsius) for the second pass. Also important: pH.
Just for anyone who wanted the details. And again, every source I’ve looked at confirms DI / Extremely pure water isn’t going to be an issue unless you’re deficient in some way, or otherwise drinking such quantities that it would be unsafe pure or not.
I wonder if someone has misunderstood the risk of drinking deionized water, like from a laboratory deionizer in a chemistry lab.
As a lab solvent, deionized water is considered ultra-pure, but it’s biologically unsanitary since the DI process doesn’t sterilize it of microbes. Everybody gets a warning not to drink from the DI tap, so maybe some folks misunderstood the reason. Now that I think of it, I bet employees at the ice skating rink use the same water and get the same warning. Don’t drink the deionized water (it’s probably got bugs).
To reiterate, there’s absolutely no harm from drinking distilled that’s been processed in a sanitary manner. If your body gets gradually lower on salts over time, you won’t suddenly collapse without warning. Your food and thirst signals will point you back in the right direction.
I fully agree that distilled water is safe to drink. But there is a significant difference between distilled water and “very pure” water. Some labs require actual pure water for physical experiments. There are (were when I was active a few decades ago) only a few sources of the water in the US. As I remember it, it can’t be shipped, even in sealed containers it absorbs minerals from the storage container. Scientists go to great lengths to make ultra pure water and use it immediately before it becomes contaminated. So for instance if you want to measure the speed of sound in water you come to the production facility and set up your experiment. Of course we are talking about a couple of million atoms of contaminants in a significant quantity of water-so nothing so simple as distilled water. All gases have to be removed for instance so it can never be exposed to air. I don’t know whether it is safe to drink, but it would be an experience. 
Another data point:
Distilled water is disgusting when you drink it. I’ve had to drink some when it was all we had because we were homeless, it was cheap, and we used the car to hook up Mom’s BI-PAP machine at night. But it’s gross.
Yes, this. Making ultrapure water is very difficult, and much more involved than just distillation. At minimum you’d probably have several rounds of distillation, exposure to UV light to kill any bacteria, gross filtration (“gross” in this instance is a very relative term), filtration over ion exchange resins, and ultrafiltration. And even then you still have detectable levels of impurities, in the range of parts per billion or parts per trillion.
All that said, I would very strongly suspect that it would be fine to drink (from a health perspective), as long as you don’t drink gallons and gallons of it. Most people consume more salt and minerals than they probably should anyway, so any loss would probably be replaced in short order. Over the long term maybe it would cause some problems, but at that point it’s all speculation.
As above. There is a difference between distilled water as you can generally purchase it, and ultra-pure water. Ultra pure water comes up in discussions occasionally as a dangerous material. It is pretty weird stuff. Some people call it “hungry water.” One chemist suggested to me that “water does not like being this pure.” Water purity gets designated by its resistivity. I visited a local brewery ages ago, and they had an industrial scale reverse osmosis and sand filter system to feed the brewing process. They also had a tap outside the brewery where the local could fill up containers with water for free. The water they used was 1.8 MΩ resistivity. That is pretty pure, but also nice to drink. The dissolved oxygen content seems to make it sweet tasting.
I also visited an integrated circuit plant. They also have an industrial scale reverse osmosis and filtration plant. It is much more rigorous. Sand bed filters and UV irradiation in multiple passes. The water they get is rated at 18MΩ. That is basically as pure as the chemistry of water can get. This water is pretty interesting.
It will strip the dyes out of the piping - everything is bleached white. It will tear the colour out of the leather of your shoes if you spill it on your feet. It will de-grease stuff. Which is impressive for what is supposed to be a polar solvent. It is used in huge quantities to clean silicon wafers in the various stages of IC production. It isn’t just that it needs to be clean, it will strip off stuff by the nature of its chemistry.
It seems pretty clear that the properties of 18MΩ water are what give rise to the continuous stories about the dangers of very pure water. OTOH, there does not actually seem to be any evidence that ingesting 18MΩ water actually will cause any issues. It can’t stay ultra pure very long.
I did find this amusing MSDS.