this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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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.
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://www.kidney.org/atoz/content/hyponatremia#:~:text=Interesting%20fact%3A%20in%20most%20cases,can%20be%20out%20of%20balance.
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
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 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 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.
I'm not sure how this is relevant to the point I've made, since I never said that we obtain a significant portion of electrolytes from water.
From page 151, this was accounted for in rat studies.
*Reduced skeletal ossification was also found in rat foetuses whose dams were given distilled water in a one-year study. Apparently the reduced mineral intake from water was not compensated by their diets, even if the animals were kept on standardized diet that was physiologically adequate in caloric value, nutrients and salt composition. *
From page 152
Regular intake of low-mineral content water could be associated with the progressive evolution of the changes discussed above, possibly without manifestation of symptoms or causal symptoms over the years. Nevertheless, severe acute damage, such as hyponatremic shock or delirium, may occur following intense physical efforts and ingestion of several litres of lowmineral water (10).
"The "intoxication" risk increases with decreasing levels of TDS."
TDS is an acronym for Total Dissolved Solids. In other words, the purer the water, the higher the chances of developing water intoxication, also known as hyponatremia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybCFHgsq_sU
Normal water will flush out electrolytes if you drink too much of it, distilled water is just more prone to doing this for physics based reasons. What Neil DeGrasse Tyson states in the video is in accordance to what the WHO says.
Ok, it's a little less intuitive to come at it from the opposite direction, but it's exactly the same argument: A liter of distilled water "sucks up" just 20mg more salt from the body than a liter of tap water. It "takes" that 20mg of salt from the 42 liters of water in the body.
The effect of the "physics based reasons" you are talking about is 20mg of salt from the entire body. Less than half a milligram of salt per liter of body fluids.
The normal range of serum sodium levels is about 15mg of salt per liter, or 30 times the difference caused by switching from tap to distilled.
In other words, this is an entirely theoretical risk that has zero practical effect on your neighbor's hyponatremia.
Alrighty then. And I'll trust what the WHO and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have to say on this topic as its within their field of expertise. The WHO are experts on health and Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be expected to have a better understanding of the physics of equilibrium compared to the average internet forumer.
A ~~snake oil salesman would~~ mineral water salesman did have you fooled.
You presented your neighbor's hyponatremia as a result of drinking distilled water; the WHO did not mention hyponatremia being a risk of distilled water.
I have no idea what Tyson said on the subject. I suspect you're citing him about as accurately as you cited WHO.
From page 152
"Regular intake of low-mineral content water could be associated with the progressive evolution of the changes discussed above, possibly without manifestation of symptoms or causal symptoms over the years. Nevertheless, severe acute damage, such as hyponatremic shock or delirium, may occur following intense physical efforts and ingestion of several litres of lowmineral water (10)."
“The “intoxication” risk increases with decreasing levels of TDS.” (Bolded for emphasis.)
TDS is an acronym for Total Dissolved Solids. In plain English, the purer the water, the higher the chances of developing water intoxication, also known as hyponatremia. Neil DeGrasse Tyson's statements are in accordance to what the WHO said.
Bolded the relevant bit for emphasis. It's the "several liters" part that damages your argument. You also conveniently omitted the very next sentence:
Turns out that ingesting "several liters" of just about anything is going to affect homeostasis faster than the kidneys can correct it.
Go ahead and quantify that risk. When you do the math, you'll find that 1 liter of chemically pure water poses the same risk of hyponatremia as approximately 1.002 liters of tap water. Which makes the WHO statement technically true, but definitely misleading.
That's likely true, but you've misrepresented WHO, so I'm assuming it likely you've misrepresented Tyson as well.
It is recommended by Mayo Clinic that men drink 3.7 litres of water a day and for women that recommendation is 2.7 litres per day, which constitutes "several litres". https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256#:~:text=About%2015.5%20cups%20(3.7%20liters,fluids%20a%20day%20for%20women
That isn't my job and neither is it yours. If the WHO says that the risk of water intoxication is greater the purer the water is, then I'm inclined to believe that what they are saying is true, especially given that the topic in which those statements are said in concerns the health risks of drinking demineralized water. The additional risk is significant enough to warrant a mention. The difference between the percentage of H₂O of tap water and ultrapure water is very small and seemingly insignificant, and yet ultrapure water can do things that normal water cannot, such as dissolving metal. So I'm not sure I understand the notion that because there's a tiny difference chemically, that would translate to a tiny difference in how the solvent behaves physically.
What did I misrepresent?
They also recommend 2300mg of sodium, maximum. The average American consumes 3400mg a day.
I've replaced too many galvanized pipes for you to tell me that tap water cannot dissolve metal.
We aren't talking about galvanized pipes. We're talking about distilled water in large amounts being bad for you. If you feel that what the WHO and Neil DeGrasse Tyson said is inaccurate or misleading, then I'm sure there are various ways to contact them and see what they have to say. There's only so many ways I can explain things to people before it gets tiring. Have a good day.
You're talking about a carbon steel wrench that rusted away on the bottom of a stainless steel tank due to Galvanic corrosion. It is an extremely common problem for submerged metals. It is usually mitigated by sacrificial zinc anodes, which are slowly dissolved byb the water, protecting submerged structural and mechanical conponents of boats, ships, pipelines, and structures.
The claim from that article is bogus. It was written by someone who does not understand what they are talking about, for an audience that doesn't care.
Rust and corrosion ≠ dissolving. We don't say that we corrode table salt in water. Like I said, if you think that you know better than the World Health Organization and Neil DeGrasse Tyson on this topic feel free to contact them and see what they have to say.
Neither WHO nor Tyson claimed that pure water dissolves metal. That claim came from an article you linked about a Japanese science project, which uses a large tank of pure water as part of a neutrino detector. The entire article was a B-story to that neutrino detection project.
Between the author and the translator, the distinction between "dissolve" and "corrode" went missing. Context restores it for anyone who recognizes the conditions present in that tank. That was simple galvanic corrosion, not some mysterious property imbued on water by distillation or reverse osmosis filtration. The exact same process occurs within fresh water and within water in which considerable amounts of electrolytes and minerals are dissolved (salt water).