this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
42 points (80.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43970 readers
994 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's really the same thing. Tapwater contains barely any sodium, and the average western person had a harder time bringing down their dietary sodium than keeping it up.
Tapwater contains some 40mg of sodium per liter, one single slice of bread contains some 200mg, at least.
People seem to be misunderstanding things here and misconstruing that distilled water being bad in large amounts due to it lacking electrolytes implies that we get a significant portion of sodium from water.
It isn't about not getting enough sodium from water intake (as others have said, the amount of sodium in normal water is tiny), but more to do with the fact that distilled water has no solutes and is very "eager" to suck up any solutes it encounters. If you are only drinking distilled water (or are drinking large amounts of it quickly) it's going to easily flush out the electrolytes already present in your body regardless of your diet. These electrolytes inside of the body are important for cellular homeostasis.
With a solvent such as water even a little amount of dissolved solutes are going to change how the solution as a whole behaves. The small amount of solutes in normal water means that normal water is less "hungry" for solutes compared to distilled water. I'm bad at explaining things but the gist is it's less about nutrition and more to do with physics. Cells in the body are sensitive to changes in osmotic pressure. If there's less electrolytes outside the cell compared to inside, the cells will swell and burst. If there's more electrolytes outside the cell compared to inside, the cell will shrivel up. There has to be a perfect balance.
https://facty.com/lifestyle/wellness/should-my-family-drink-distilled-water/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/indiana-woman-dies-drinking-too-much-water-b2391456.html
This paper by the WHO goes into more detail under "Health Risks Of Drinking Demineralized Water" on page 148. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/43403/9241593989_eng.pdf?sequence=1
I'm a chemist, not a biologist, so I'm a bit fuzzy on stuff like cells. But I can do basic maths (and obviously chemistry) and I have Google.
The difference in sodium between tapwater and distilled water is 40mg per liter. So at most, drinking a liter of distilled water you're going to lose 40mg of sodium more than with tapwater.
Your blood contains 140ish mmol of sodium per liter. At 26 grams per mole, that's 3650mg/liter. The difference between blood and tapwater is already huge, which is why you can easily get hyponatremia from drinking regular tap- or mineralwater (as you showed in your link). Whether it's a difference of 3610mg/l or 3650mg/l doesn't matter at all, the gradient is already very steep with normal water.
The other very obvious bit of evidence are the thousands of people on ocean-going ships who drink water from reverse-osmosis filters, which is basically completely mineral-free too.