Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Johnythree 1419 days ago
> pure distilled water is bad for you.

This is a particularly annoying myth. When the water passes through the gut it picks up plenty of mineralisation, as well as other gunge.

2 comments

Your point is well taken, but if you have never witnessed it in extreme I believe you are not evaluating it fairly.

On ships, vacuum vapor distillation is quite common for drinking water production. This is because the equipment is used to generate boiler feed water, which must be high quality distillate. Acquiring additional water-making equipment is redundant.

Nutritional content can be limited and lacking diversity. Many minerals in the body are of very low concentration, they are nevertheless, necessary. Osmosis will delpete the body of these over time. The health effects of this would require a longterm study for chronic symptoms to appear. I have never seen any study of this nature. I have seen mariners after several months at sea with no other water source and, yes anecdotally, they look like hell. I will not drink distilled water for any length of time, but a few weeks would never amount to anything.

So in your day to day life, sure, you have a healthy, diverse, first-world diet and have no ill-effect from drinking distilled water. You can 'live' drinking only Coke. Appalling, certainly, but doable. In terms of cost and energy expense, distilled water is likely higher than Coke to produce, though that is an aside.

You're partially correct, but missed the important point here. As a result your advice is dangerous to health.

You don't want water picking up minerals from your body .. you want it DEPOSITING minerals into your body. That's the way we evolved obtaining minerals from water from streams where the water runs over rocks to mineralise.