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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. |