At my local hardware store they sell something called “Demineralised Water High Purity” and on the back of the packaging it says something like, “If consumed, rinse out mouth immediately with clean water.”
Why is it dangerous if it’s cleaner water?
In: Chemistry
In a lot of cases labels are put there because an ignorant lawyer in the legal department figures that we need to do something “just in case”. You can’t really explain them that if a water would be toxic then mouth rinse would not help much. This “do something” mentality and “better safe than sorry” ideology leads to a lot of totally nonsense rule and label. Anyways, rinsing your mouth does nothing except making someone happy in the legal department.
Drinking distilled or deionized water in general is not terrible problematic. The two reasons why it’s told not to drink are as follows.
In chemistry class it’s banned from drinking for safety reasons. You never know what contamination may have left in a vessel or dropped into the otherwise distilled water, after distillation. So it’s kind of “do not drink or eat anything from the lab, ever ever even if it is labelled as distilled water or normal salt or whatever otherwise edible thing”. Unfortunately there are always those few idiots whom you cant just simply ask not to, so you indoctrinate the big red ban label with word of power. And then many people remember only that “there was something in chemistry lab about not to drink distilled water because toxic”.
The other thing is that even though you can consume distilled water it indeed ultimately washes off salts from your body. But it’s not like you drink a glass of distilled water and you drop dead. It is about the balance, and if you eat very salty and mineral rich food, then some distilled water is perhaps even better. Your body doesn’t know if the salt comes from food or the water. It may be a problem on the long term if you eat mainly sodium chloride and no calcium and magnesium because those would come from the water at some extent and so with d-water and salty chips you get both salted and unsalted. The real problem occurs however if someone does intense sport and with sweating they lose a lot of salt. Water poisoning can happen if they drink pure water in large amounts and suddenly. This is when you suddenly dilute the leftover minerals by drinking water. It can happen even with normal drinking water but much faster with distilled water. The thing is that you never know your salt levels and you can’t undo drinking a liter of d-water. So if you don’t know exactly what you do, it’s safer not to.
So again, in certain conditions it’s absolutely no problem to drink deionized or distilled water if it’s otherwise pure (in terms of bacteria for example). But for those few cases when stupid people do stupid things and you as water seller may be held accountable, you are safer to just put a big general ban on it. Because it’s always better to be overly salted and your kidneys will sort it, than being in low mineral shock and your heart stopped before your kidneys had the chance.
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