The problems with drinking distilled and R/O waters

This is a repost of about the problem with consuming purified waters.

When waters are demineralized, whether through R/O, resin exchange, or distillation they become more solvent.  This is very basic chemistry.  In fact remember from chemistry the term that water is the universal solvent?  Water does not have a brain to say I will only take the bad stuff and leave the good stuff.  It takes what it comes in to contact with until it saturates.  In fact all of the above waters when exposed to air will quickly become acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide from the air forming carbonic acid.  Ask any lab working with purified waters about this fact.  By the way they also tend to grow bacteria very fast.  The acidity and bacterial problems are why ultra pure waters have to be constantly recirculated through their filter systems to keep them ultra pure.  Also because of the fact that they are highly corrosive.

Instead of going through a long explanation of basic chemistry though, there is a much easier way to prove my point.

How do vitamins and minerals move from the digestive system in to the bloodstream? They are dissolved and carried by water in to the bloodstream.

When you take an excess of B vitamins or vitamin C how do they make it in to the urine to turn the urine bright yellow? They are dissolved in and carried by water in to the urine.

When you form calcium oxalate stones, how did the calcium get in to the body in the first place to form the stones?  It is dissolved and carried by water in to the body.

When we eat food how does the nutrition get from the gut in to the bloodstream, and then to where those nutrients are required by the body?  They are dissolved and carried by water.

How do we lose nutrients through sweat?  The nutrients are dissolved by water and carried out through the sweat.

Should I go on?

Again, water is a solvent.  The more pure that water is the more solvent it will become.  And ultra pure waters, such as type 1 water, are actually so solvent that they actually become highly corrosive. Water will try to saturate with whatever it can dissolve, which includes vitamins and minerals. This is the principle of how these nutrients get in to our body, and the primary way that they are removed from the body.  If the water is saturated with minerals ahead of time, such as spring water, the solvency of the water is greatly reduced.  Instead of robbing the body of nutrients, the water must first give up what it is already saturated with in order to carry something else out of the body, such as toxins or nutrients.  If the water has been purified then it is going to look for a source of saturation. These sources include toxins and nutrients.

A simple way to understand this is imagine I have two glasses both containing the same amount of water.  One glass is R/O water, and one is spring water.  Normally I use sugar in my analogy, but since we are talking nutrition lets go with vitamin C.  If I start stirring the vitamin C crystals in to the water the vitamin C will dissolve in both waters because the water is highly SOLVENT.  Guess what else we will observe with this experiment?  We will find that more vitamin C will dissolve in the R/O water than will dissolve in the spring water.  Why?  Because the spring water was already partially saturated, and thus had less solvency than the R/O water.  Therefore, we prove several important points here.  1. Water is solvent.  2. The more pure water is the more solvent it becomes.  3. Water will continue to dissolve until it becomes saturated, or in some cases can be made to supersaturate.  4. Water can and does dissolve nutrients allowing for their absorption and excretion.

Even gold dissolves in water, which is why seawater contains so much gold.  And bacteria pull dissolved gold in river water to form gold nuggets.

Now, let's try a different example.  We know that lead is toxic and calcium is a nutrient.  We also know that calcium is a treatment for lead poisoning because it is is more reactive than lead (electromotive series of chemicals).  So if we have lead poisoning and we want to use calcium to treat it how is this going to be done unless the water dissolves both the calcium and the lead?  The calcium has to be dissolved in the water in order for it to reach the lead in the first place.  Then as the calcium displaces the lead, how do we eliminate the lead?  The water must then take up the lead to carry it out of the body.  So as we can see the water dissolved and carried not only the calcium, but also the lead.

As another example let's say you drink a lot of colas, which are high in phosphorus.  The elevated phosphorus, which by the way is also a nutrient that was dissolved in a water medium, leads to a release of parathyroid hormone (PTH), which in turn breaks down bone tissue to release calcium. But wait, where is that calcium going to go if it cannot be dissolved by water?  Luckily this nutrient is dissolved in water though, which allows it to enter the bloodstream to balance out the calcium/phosphorus ratio.  But what happens to all the excess calcium in the blood now since elevated serum calcium can cause all sorts of problems?  The water then carries this nutrient out through the urine.

And how do you suppose plants get their nutrients from the soil?  The minerals (nutrients) cannot be absorbed dry.  The fact is that water evaporates, which is natural distillation.  This naturally distilled, and therefore solvent water, then comes down as rain, snow, or fog.  As this purified water comes in to contact with the minerals, and organic material, of the soil and dust in the air it saturates with these nutrients just as it can do in the body.  This mineralized and otherwise saturated water is then used to irrigate crops.  And just as with the human body, the plants use the water to move the nutrients to their cells.

The short of it is that ANY purified water, whether it be R/O, distilled or some other form of deionization the water will be highly solvent.  And once again water CANNOT pick or choose what it will absorb from the body.  It is going to try to saturate with whatever it comes in to contact with, whether than be a nutrient or a toxin.