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Could you drink distilled water with a mineral pill (swg-empire.de)

submitted 7 months ago by bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Corno@lemm.ee 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 points 7 months ago

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.

If you are only drinking distilled water it's going to flush out the electrolytes already present in your body.

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.