The science of saline – why can we drink pure water, but when we put water into our bodies in other ways, like an IV, must we add minerals to it?
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Water wants to be evenly mixed with the salts and such that are around it. If you add a drop of food coloring to a glass of water, it will slowly move on its own until there is a uniform mixture.
Your blood is a salty fluid filled with balloons called cells. If you add plain water, the salty fluid just gets diluted, but water also moves into the balloons to dilute their contents. This causes the balloons to swell up and burst. The extra water would also leave the blood vessels and cause swelling in other places, which can be especially bad in the brain which doesn’t have room to expand because it’s surrounded by the skull.
Your stomach is a special place that is designed to take stuff from the outside and prepare it for your body to use. The cells are protected from being burst and it can buffer things a bit better. You can still mess it up with too much water (think gallons at once, but people have died from drinking too much water) but for everyday use it is safe.
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