How is drinking distilled water bad for you?

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I heard in science class once years ago that distilled water is water so clean, it kills you. How?

In: Biology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Drinking distilled water

Yes, you can drink distilled water. However, you might not like the taste because it’s flatter and less flavorful than tap and bottled waters.
Companies produce distilled water by boiling water and then condensing the collected steam back into a liquid. This process removes impurities and minerals from the water.
Some sources claim that drinking distilled water will help detoxify your body and improve your health. Others claim distilled water leaches minerals from your body and could put your health at risk. In reality, neither of these claims is entirely true.

Side effects of distilled water: Pros and cons

Aside from its flat taste, distilled water doesn’t provide you with minerals like calcium and magnesium that you get from tap water.
Since distilled water doesn’t contain its own minerals, it has a tendency to pull them from whatever it touches to maintain a balance. So when you drink distilled water, it may pull small amounts of minerals from your body, including from your teeth.
Because you already get most of the minerals you need from your diet, drinking distilled water shouldn’t make you deficient. Still, if you’re going to drink distilled water, it’s a good idea to make sure you get your recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables.

Pros

Depending on where you live, distilled water could be better for you than tap water. If your town’s water is tainted with harmful chemicals or pesticides, you’re safer drinking distilled.

Cons

Storing distilled water could be more of a problem. Distilled water can pull in minerals from any material it touches. This means it can absorb trace amounts of plastic or whatever substance is in the container that’s holding it.

CREDIT:
https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-drink-distilled-water

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can drink distilled water, however you can’t drink nothing but distilled water, firstly the taste isn’t that good, but the lack of minerals means that no only don’t you get any from the water, but the water will leech minerals from your body.

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, although drinking *only* distilled water is not necessarily the best idea. Most water has minerals in it like sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium and calcium. We call these electrolytes. Electrolytes are essential for our body chemistry to work properly. Without electrolytes, we die. By drinking only distilled water, you’re throwing off your body chemistry because not only are you not getting those electrolytes, but can actually pull them out of your body. This is why, for example, if you’re in the hospital and you get an IV, it’s not pure water but saline, which is water with a bit of salt in it. It’s also why when someone has been vomiting or has had diarrhea, they’re advised to hydrate not with plain water but with something like a sports drink which has electrolytes in it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It won’t kill you (unless you drink nothing else), but it’s also not a good idea. The reasoning is that soluble compounds in your body will readily dissolve into distilled water, thus depriving you of important minerals and electrolytes. The water we drink, whether tap or bottled, already has loads of such minerals in solution, so it has a far lesser capacity to absorb nutrients from your body and thus it doesn’t upset your equilibrium.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think maybe you are confusing distilled water with deionized water. Distilled water is just boiled and then the vapors are condensed into a second (very clean) vessel, leaving behind most impurities in the first vessel.

Deionized water has ions, charged non-organic particles, removed. Your body, however, needs salts to survive. This is why when you get an IV at the doctor’s office they give you a saline solution rather than straight water. Flooding your ststen with pure water would “pull” essential salts from your cells (or dilute them) which could kill you. DI water is the purest, so in this case would be the most potent.

Anonymous 0 Comments

>How is drinking distilled water bad for you?

It isn’t, in any significant way.