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.
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!
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/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/indiana-woman-dies-drinking-too-much-water-b2391456.html
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.
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.
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