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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 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.