Y’all are missing the obvious… Ultrapure water has been purified of all the nasty stuff, hence “science” tells us that the effect of all that nasty stuff has been greatly magnified!!!
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Please tell me which nutrient is present in water, but not present in food.
For people who eat meat… well whatever is in us is in meat as far as basic minerals. But maybe vegan’s get something important from water that is extremely scarce in plants?
The theoretical argument, is two fold:
- DI water reduces the available minerals in the system by absorbing them into the waste stream
- The intake of food is a derth of this mineral
That’s only way I could conceive that DI water would kill anyone. I just looked up Zinc, and, it’s not pretty:
Zinc Deficiency
Zinc deficiency is characterized by growth retardation, loss of appetite, and impaired immune function. In more severe cases, zinc deficiency causes hair loss, diarrhea, delayed sexual maturation, impotence, hypogonadism in males, and eye and skin lesions [2,8,24,25]. Weight loss, delayed healing of wounds, taste abnormalities, and mental lethargy can also occur [5,8,26-30]. Many of these symptoms are non-specific and often associated with other health conditions; therefore, a medical examination is necessary to ascertain whether a zinc deficiency is present.
Zinc nutritional status is difficult to measure adequately using laboratory tests [2,31,32] due to its distribution throughout the body as a component of various proteins and nucleic acids [33]. Plasma or serum zinc levels are the most commonly used indices for evaluating zinc deficiency, but these levels do not necessarily reflect cellular zinc status due to tight homeostatic control mechanisms [8]. Clinical effects of zinc deficiency can be present in the absence of abnormal laboratory indices [8]. Clinicians consider risk factors (such as inadequate caloric intake, alcoholism, and digestive diseases) and symptoms of zinc deficiency (such as impaired growth in infants and children) when determining the need for zinc supplementation [2].
http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-HealthProfessional/#h5
The menacing dangers of hydrogen monoxide!
Actually, you don’t need to worry about zinc - potassium imbalance can do the job. Some years back, I did the Atkins Diet and some tough workout at the same time. Mistake - Atkins contains almost zero potassium. No bananas, no potatoes, etc. I very nearly passed out a few times before I discovered “lite salt,” which is loaded with KCl.
Guzzle up enough water and you will get electrolyte imbalance. The symptoms go from muscle spasms to seizures to death. But it takes a whole lot of water.
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A brief survey of google results on Zinc suggests that we get most of our zinc from food, though contaminated water is a source of too much Zinc.
It also suggests that zinc deficiencies are usually the result of the consumption of foods that reduce zinc absorption or other disease.
Thus except as ‘the straw that broke the camels back’ drinking water with less than ordinary zinc levels does not seem to be a risk.
You need to add something like “significantly more than ordinary soft tap water (eg Portland Oregon)”. It must be a significant ‘ultra pure’ water specific effect. Not, as simple calculations suggest a matter of getting the same effect by drinking 1% more Portland tap water.
This meme that distilled water is unhealthy and strips minerals out of your body just won’t die, and yet I’ve never found a study that concludes that. We get our minerals from food much more than water.
My anecdote is that I’ve been drinking and cooking with exclusively distilled water for around seven years. I also do hot yoga twice a week and sweat off several pounds per class. Maybe I’m at death’s door and don’t realize it, but I feel fine and my blood tests haven’t turned up any signs of deficiency.
Given the many reports that tap water is contaminated with pesticides, pharmaceuticals, frat boy urine, etc, I think the long-term health effects of tap water seem much grimmer than those of distilled water.
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What are electrolytes? Do you even know?
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Um, Glitch - Osmosis when I was at school was the net movement of water from a lesser tonic solution to a higher one, e.g. tap water to sea water across a porous membrane.
How the kidneys remove minerals from your blood is more complex and I won’t claim to be any expert but Osmosis it ain’t 
Instead of debating on if it will kill you, consider if it’s unhealthy for you.
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Hmm. You know something really magical has to be happening for ‘ultra pure’ water to be a health hazard over the long term.
Because all the water we drink, ultra pure, straight from puddles, whatever is absorbed into our bodies, cycles around a while, and then eventually gets out via pee, sweat, poo, etc. Thus for ‘ultra pure’ water to do anything that 1.01x as much Portland tap water cannot do the ‘ultra pure’ water would have to trigger some irreversible process of nutrient extraction before it mixes with your body at becomes decidedly impure. Like a bit of your germanium is pulled into the ultra-pure water still in your mouth before it mixes with your spit (while it would not be pulled into portland tap water because of concentration gradients) and reacts into some non-bio-available form which is excreted.
Your body has X amount of minerals in it. If you add pure water to the mineral-water mix already in your body, you dilute your mineral pool. This happens across the various semi-permeable membranes of your flesh and organs.
How is this not osmosis?
Osmosis is low concentration to high concentration, isn’t it? Isn’t this diffusion instead?
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But the meat we eat is from herbivores, so they get their minerals from plants. It’s the plants who get their minerals from soil and water.
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I’ve had DI. It’s gross, as David notes. It’s liquid–in your mouth–but there’s nothing there. It’s like air. It’s very offputting. That said, it makes fucking great tea (there are tons of ions in tea).
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It certainly can if you freeze a cubic meter of it and drop it on your head from a great height.
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On it’s own it is. Cut with absolute EtOH and a pinch of citric acid for flavour on the other hand…
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Diffusion is without a membrane in between.
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Side note- we were raising fertilized frog eggs into mature tadpoles and decided distilled water was a great place to start for their shallow water environment, which also included river rocks and water plants they could hide in and around. They were fed the required food and looked healthy and happy when the elapsed time for their transition to frogs came and went, and many months later we decided we now had tadpoles as pets instead of new dart frogs.
I’m not sure why, but later we switched to purified drinking water during their water changes and suddenly, less than a week later, legs sprouted and their transformation into juvenile frogs continued on a normal course!
Could be related to pH. Distilled water is slightly acidic (pH 6-7) because it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. It’s hard to argue that this acidity could affect human health since most of our beverages are acidic (even milk is, and soda is down around 2), but maybe the tadpoles couldn’t grow legs in it.
