I’m confused if it is a marketing term or if it’s a real way to make safe drinking water? If you distill water you are physically removing contaminants, which makes sense that it is safe to drink. De-ionizing is like removing ions, but what does that mean, is the water now cleaner?
In: Chemistry
Ions are salt. Sodium, potassium, chloride, magnesium, etc. Ions are also called electrolytes in some food products. Same thing. They are good for you in general, and necessary for life.
These ions can be lowered or removed in two ways. The first is by boiling the water and cooling the steam down to liquid. This is called distillation. It significantly reduces dissolved salts, but a good amount still remain.
The second is reverse osmosis and ion exchange. This uses fancy filters that literally push the ions out of the water. It can result in very high purity to almost chemically pure water. This is called deionized, as it has little to no detectable ion content.
Distilled water is used when some salt is OK but not a lot. Like clothing irons, where you don’t want residue from salt to build up inside.
Deionized water is used in situations where you don’t want any salts at all, mostly in chemistry and medicine manufacturing, or in cleaning electronics.
It is unsafe to drink deionized water. It will literally pull out ions from your cells, damaging your insides. A little bit is OK, but you shouldn’t drink it in large amounts. Like a single cup can harm you. A liter or two can kill you.
Distilled water is safer to drink as it still has ions, but it is not better for you than water with full ions (it’s worse for you). You shouldn’t drink too much, but it won’t rip your cells apart like deionized. It’s really only desirable to drink if you are in a survival situation, like drinking sea water or river water that you distill to lower salt and bad contaminants.
Some home drinking water taps, and bottled water, uses deionized/reverse osmosis water that is then redissolve with salts.
This allows you to remove bad tasting salts like Magnesium, purify sea water in large quantities for drinking, and also remove any heavy metal impurities like lead. Ions like sodium and potassium are always added back to make it safe to drink.
So, always drink water with electrolytes/ions. If you distrust your municipal water supply, you can buy a reverse osmosis and re-ionization kit and install it in your kitchen tap.
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