Can Distilled Water Kill You If You Drink It Every Day?

Drinking distilled water is quite common nowadays due to the deteriorating quality of tap water in many countries around the world. Due to the decline of tap water quality, the bottled water industry continues to thrive thanks to its growing market. If your water source contains harmless contaminants that change the taste and smell of your water, you might want to check out the health risks of drinking distilled water before switching to this type of purified water. In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits and drawbacks of this particular type of water, as well as how distilled water compares to other types of water on the market today.

What Is Distilled Water?

Distilled water is a type of pure water that goes through a boiling and evaporation process where impurities are left on the first container. The filtered water is transferred to the other boiling chamber in the form of vapor.

The method of boiling water to distill it has been used since the early years of mankind to purify sea water during voyages. While there have been improvements to water purification methods, the development of the practice and method of distilling water in the early centuries played a significant role in human history.

Pros of Drinking Distilled Water

Despite its lack of minerals, distilled water make up for this disadvantage by making sure areas with poor water quality are supplied with clean and safe drinking water. While we would like the idea of drinking water with intact minerals, there are places in many countries with non-potable water. Overall, it depends on where you live as drinking distilled water may be better for you if your water source is contaminated.

Since bottled distilled water is found in supermarkets, pharmacies, and even smaller stores, they play a big part in areas of different countries without clean and safe drinking water.

Although they aren’t the perfect type of drinking water due to the lack of certain minerals, they are significant in many areas around the world. Since they lack minerals, bacteria and other forms of microorganisms will not grow, much less thrive in such an environment.

Therefore, there is no bacterial growth in this type of purified water after it has gone through the distillation process. It is completely “clean” and ready to drink.

Cons of Distilled Water

Although drinking distilled water does not pose a direct threat to your health, the lack of essential minerals in the water will result in mineral deficiencies in the long haul, unless you are careful with your diet. Natural minerals like calcium and magnesium can be found in tap water but not in distilled water. These are among the total dissolved solids in water, and are essential to good human health.

Distilled Water Removes Minerals

The distillation process removes most, if not all of the minerals and ions in the drinking water. If you’re already in need of calcium or other minerals found in drinking water, then don’t deprive your body by switching to this type of purified water.

This type of water is safe to drink. But since distilled water does not have essential minerals like calcium, they tend to pull small amounts of minerals from the human body when you drink the purified water.

Fortunately, you don’t need to worry about mineral deficiency since you can get these from a healthy diet. If you drink distilled water regularly, fruits and vegetables can supply the daily mineral needs of your body.

Plastic Bottles

The sad part about drinking distilled water is its storage problem. Since this type of purified water in liquid form can pull in minerals from anything it gets into contact with, there are chances it will absorb harmful elements in the containers. So if you’re storing yours in plastic containers, the water may pull in trace amounts of plastic that may be harmful to your health.

Furthermore, water in plastic bottles is never a great solution to the problem of water purification, since they are harmful to the environment and costly to purchase over time.

Lack Of Minerals

The lack of naturally occurring minerals and ions in distilled water is a cause for concern since the human body needs recommended amounts of minerals to stay healthy. If you’re someone in need of calcium, then drinking distilled water isn’t recommended for you since it lacks minerals in the first place. It is important to check the mineral content of your drinking water before you use it as your primary water source due to health concerns.

Can Babies Drink Distilled Water?

Yes, babies can drink distilled water if you’re worried about the quality of your tap water. However, the lack of minerals and ions must be taken into consideration when using it as an alternative to tap water and other sources of drinking water.

Babies and young children need healthy minerals perhaps more than anyone else. So it’s important to factor in this consideration before you recommend drinking distilled water. This should also be taken into consideration before recommending distilled water to the elderly, as they also need water to help support a balanced diet.

Distilled Water Vs Tap Water

In most homes, tap water comes mostly from the kitchen sink and bathroom faucets. The drinking and cooking water in your area may be pristine, or it may be slightly tainted. This depends largely on your water treatment in your municipality and whether they go above and beyond EPA guidelines for tap water.

To ensure they have the purest water possible, homeowners can send their tap water in for further testing if there is any question of safety. There are also research databases online that can tell you if there are any contaminants in your town’s water. You may also learn the best steps to take if there are contaminants in your water supply.

In order to combat contamination in your local water supply, you may need to purchase a reverse osmosis filter, bottled waters, or sparkling water to avoid unwanted chemicals. Water contamination may be an ongoing problem, or it may be spurred on by a crisis due to an accident, crude oil spill, or natural disaster.

How Tap Water Gets Purified

Municipal water authorities treat all drinking water in the United States with chlorine at a safe level to help eliminate bacteria and harmful pathogens. The result is water that is part of a healthy and well-balanced diet. This water can be used confidently in cooking, baking, boiling ground coffee beans, and washing foods and dishes for you and your family.

Though this chlorinated water is still safe to drink, some homeowners report bad smells and tastes associated with the chlorination. About 3 out of 4 Americans also drink water that has been treated with fluoride, which is generally tasteless but is recommended to eliminate tooth decay. For this reason, many people elect to purchase some other water filter, such as reverse osmosis filters, to further remove dangerous chemicals like carbonic acid and impurities like chlorine.

Distilled Water Vs. Mineral Water

Mineral water is usually naturally slightly carbonated with a small amount of carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid in water. This liquid is bottled at its source to maintain high levels of minerals. This type of water, also known as spring water, is typically high in calcium, magnesium, and sodium. At high levels, these minerals can make water chalky and lead to scale buildup. This leads to a less than palatable taste and appearance of the water that is ultimately harmless. Nevertheless, even at high levels calcium, magnesium, and sodium are all healthy minerals that your body needs to function properly. For that reason, some mineral waters can be a good option to promote good health.

The health impacts of mineral water are difficult to generalize, however, because mineral waters vary so greatly in their contents. The minerals in these natural waters usually help boost bone health and combat nutrient deficiencies.

Sparkling water from a natural source can even help to lower blood pressure, benefiting heart health. Some people would like to avoid excess exposure to these types of minerals, however, so distilled water is definitely a viable option for them. There can be any number of reasons for this choice, from the recommendation of a doctor to a general desire to be more in control of one’s mineral consumption.

Distilled Water Vs. Purified Water

The only difference between both types of pure water is the level of energy used to eliminate the impurities in the drinking water. Both are essentially the same since they undergo the same principle of purifying water. They also do not add or retain the important minerals and ions in our drinking water.

Is Purified Water Safe to Drink?

Purified water, just like distilled water, is safe to drink. While drinking distilled water does not pose a grave threat to your health, there are ways to catch impurities without depriving the body of essential minerals like calcium and magnesium.

A water filter system like AquaOx’s whole house water filter will eliminate contaminants in your water. If you want to secure your pipelines and make sure pollutants will never reach every faucet in your house, invest in a water filter system today!

Does Boiling Water Distill It?

Some people think that simply boiling water will distill it, but this is not the case. Rather, bringing liquid state water to its boiling point is a part of the process of distilling water, but there’s more to it than that.

As everyone learns in science class, when water is boiling, the water evaporates into vapor. The water vapor that is produced from the liquid state boiling water must then be collected in a sterile separate container and then condensed back into liquid water. The result is filtered water that is devoid of harmful chemicals, heavy metals, and harmful organic compounds — albeit with a flat taste.

You don’t need to invest in expensive water filters to employ water distillation in your home. Water distillation is a natural process that anyone can do. It is possible to make your own distilled filtered water at home with a pot and a sterile glass bowl as a receiver flask, but this is a time-intensive process if you want to do it right.

It will take 45 minutes to an hour to turn drinking water into distilled water, according to experts. The storage container in this case my be sterile for optimal results. Water can even be double-distilled to ensure the highest purity possible, but this process of course takes even more time.

Common Uses For Distilled Water

Distilled water may lack natural nutrients, but there are many uses for this type of water other than drinking since it has been stripped of minerals. This water is essentially sterile, and so is useful in cases where a mineral buildup would cause damage to life or equipment.

Distilled water has been used for watering plants, laboratory experiments, aquariums, steam irons, medical devices, and car cooling systems. Oftentimes this type of water is useful with machinery and mechanical equipment, which require only water and not additional minerals to function properly.

What to Consider When Using Distilled Water

For using distilled water with animals, a veterinarian should be consulted to ensure that animals are ingesting a diet that contains the necessary healthy minerals. This leads to a loss of electrolytes through the kidneys and resultant low blood levels. Incidentally, if electrolyte deficiency is an ongoing problem, some types of smart water produce pure water that has been enhanced with additional electrolytes to offset this deficiency.

Can Distilled Water Kill You?

The debate on health benefits and whether drinking distilled water may kill a person or not has been going on for years. According to studies, drinking distilled water alone without any food intake will kill you because of its inability to replace the minerals and dissolved salts our body needs. This type of filtered water is hypotonic to red blood cells which can be dangerous in the long run. Fasting while you drink distilled water can be dangerous to one’s health. Fortunately, you can get the salt and minerals lacking in distilled water from your daily diet.

Some people have said that distilled water leaches minerals and therefore poses a threat to health; this couldn’t be further from the truth. Distilled water does contain slightly higher levels of acidity, but there is no scientific explanation or proof to indicate that distilled water leaches minerals from food.

Is Distilled Water Safe to Cook With?

For this reason, it is safe to cook food and bake while using distilled water. While it may lead to slightly blander food, there is no scientific proof that this process will cause the water to somehow leach useful minerals out of the food and minimize its health benefits.

While it may not be for everyone, distilled water has its uses in everyday life and therefore cannot be discounted. For this reason, leading health experts and the World Health Organization will neither recommend for or against drinking this type of water. It’s important to educate yourself on the uses and benefits of distilled water to see if it’s right for you.