Distilled Water Safe To Drink?

Distillation is a method of purifying water. To understand whether distilled water is safe or good to drink, we must know how it is produced and from where the water originated.

Distilled water is any water that has been purified by distillation. For distillation, we can use different processes, but all of them consist of boiling the water in order to produce a vapor that rids it of as many minerals, molecules (basically anything that isn’t water) as possible. Most of the non-water molecules will be evaporated, destroyed, or left behind by the distillation process, leaving you with very pure water.

As the water heats up to these boiling points, the chemicals it contains, as well as minerals, viruses, and bacteria, will be removed and some will remain at the bottom of the purifying container where they will be perfectly removed or cleaned by simple cleaning processes. Therefore, the water collected in this way has a higher purity level than the initial water.

If purified water is drunk after distillation, the resulting water might seem to be “cleaner” and “purer” than the initial water. And this is undeniably true. And yes, this water is safe to drink. That is to say that you can drink distilled water. But should you?

The disadvantage of drinking this distilled water is that most of the minerals in the water have been removed. If these minerals are good (calcium, magnesium, iron), distilled water may be considered inferior to mineral, spring, or tap water. However, if the initial water contains trace amounts (very small amounts) of organic toxins or heavy metals, we should drink distilled water instead of the untreated water.

One of the erroneous beliefs associated with distilled water is that being a hypotonic solution, our cells — through the osmosis process — absorb the water and could swell or and damage the tissues. But this turns out to be accepted to be false (largely because the food you eat would negate the effects of the distilled water), but you wouldn’t want to drink just distilled water. Not only does it taste bad but it’s lacking in minerals that you want..

By understanding these values, and noting the minimal difference between distilled water and normal drinking water, we can conclude that distilled water does not cause any discomfort, is potable, is better than drinking unclean or salt water, but isn’t recommended as a primary (or even close to primary) water source.