

The Dangerously Clean Water Used To Make Your iPhone - mef
http://www.fastcompany.com/1750612/dangerously-clean-water-used-make-your-iphone

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danelectro
Wrong.

Water does not become dangerous when it is more pure.

I've been drinking distilled bottled water for decades, and I'm not the only
one. I have been making ultrapure for decades too, which is biologically
equivalent to distilled as far as (lack of) minerals go.

As far as I can tell, the noise about leaching beneficial minerals from the
body arose with the popularity of bottled spring water and drinking water
which require less expensive processing (or no processing at all for some
grades from some sources) but sell for the same price as distilled water.

Discouragement was needed otherwise too many consumers would be drinking the
distilled.

I could put down thousands of words about this, but Ozarka has some good
waters, most consumers would be able to find one of their grades which is as
good or better than what they are getting now. The test results speak for
themselves:

[http://www.nestle-watersna.com/asset-
library/Documents/O_ENG...](http://www.nestle-watersna.com/asset-
library/Documents/O_ENG.pdf)

There is not a significant difference in mineral nutrition between their
grades, unless you were grossly deficient in your diet for a mineral which is
present in one grade but not in another.

The simple answer is you need to be getting your minerals from some place
other than your water.

The dirty little secret about industrial ultrapure water is that it usually
tastes funny because there is something left over from the processing that is
undetectable with today's limited technology, but that the olfactory & taste
buds can notice.

Ultrapure is best an application-specific process, for some purposes it can be
an unsolved mystery where once you purify it enough for superior performance
in the application, you still don't have an exact handle on why it wasn't
superior at other times. And once it works industrially, you are supposed to
think it is so pure nothing could ever be detected. Handling the purification
and QA steps in a superstitiously-slanted way from that point on is sometimes
the best functional approach.

EDIT: here's another worthwhile citation -

[http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/f/Can-You-
Drink...](http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/f/Can-You-Drink-
Distilled-Water.htm)

~~~
daughart
Ozarka's own documents detail the mineral contents of their water. Ultra pure
water by definition has no mineral content. You cannot buy ultra pure water in
a grocery store. It's (relatively) expensive to produce water this pure. You
have never consumed ultra pure water, I can guarantee it. I work in a
specialized lab and our water is only down to 4 ppb, basically murky compared
to this stuff.

~~~
danelectro
Sorry about that.

Didn't intend to be disagreeable, but I'm not drinking the kool-aid on this
one, water can not be too clean to drink, the article is a drama piece based
on a false "fact".

Also must apologize for saying ultrapure is "biologically" equivalent when I
meant dietarily equivalent for most people.

There can easily be germs or trace minerals even in commercial distilled water
which could interfere with biological cultures causing difficulties which
would not be a problem when using ultrapure.

Here's a good test sheet for the kind of ultrapure used to rate other waters
for trace elements:

[http://www.emdmillipore.com/US/en/product/Q-POD-
Element,MM_N...](http://www.emdmillipore.com/US/en/product/Q-POD-
Element,MM_NF-C84730#specifications)

The commonly consumed solvent that I want to be careful about is alcohol.

Water, OTOH is the solvent of life. A healthy solvent no doubt.

Solvent strength and solubility calculations show complete dependence on
relative concentrations of solutes, let's look at the math.

Take for example magnesium, in blood this is often the lowest in concentration
of the routine electrolytes tested, and there's no doubt the right amount of
magnesium is good for the health.

"Drinking" water is Ozarka's grade having highest magnesium at about 3.9mg/L
max. People love this stuff. Me too when I can't get distilled. But you're SOL
depending on this popular typical drinking water for magnesium completely, you
need another source.

One liter of their distilled water can have 0.1mg max of Mg. (usually way
less, but no need to test it any more sensitively since it's not ultrapure or
anything exotic)

Ultrapure at 0.0000004mg typical per liter is what we're talking about for
reference.

The cleaner the water the better the reference.

Great discrepancy here but the take away is that all these figures are
inadequate sources of magnesium compared to what you need.

In typical patients urine is draining about 6 - 10 mEq/day, or 73 to
122mg/day, for an average of 97mg/day.

Now suppose you drink in 2 liters and it ends up flowing out at 97mg/day:

Ozarka Drinking water has some (palatable) magnesium in it, so you lose less,
at 89mg

With their distilled you lose more, at least 97mg

with ultrapure you would lose the most, almost the whole 97mg

The RDA for magnesium is 310 to 420mg/day of which 350mg is recommended as
maximum from supplements. The difference between typical drinking water
magnesium content and deionized (distilled or ultrapure) is about 8mg/day when
you are supposed to be consuming at least 38x that difference per day. If
you're not getting that much magnesium your nutrition may not be the best, and
if you are getting the RDA then the 8mg delta is not much more than rounding
error. The 8mg is also a low fraction of the normal 49mg loss range from 73 to
122mg/day, and a small fraction of the full RDA.

I'm not making this up they way they are getting their facts in the article.

Distilled is a very good solvent, especially for minerals, put it in your
windshield washer tank and you can see the difference.

Delicious too, try some blind testing.

No affiliation wih Ozarka on my part either.

Not a full 1000words, but hope this helps.

~~~
daughart
It doesn't help me at all, but that's because I'm not confused about this
issue. If you drank large quantities of ultra pure water as defined in the
article, without compensating for the loss of essential salts that would
result, you would die. What you are talking about here has no relevance to
anything as far as I can tell.

------
kordless
I wonder if there is a good medical use for this? Leaching things out of one's
body is sometimes desired.

~~~
daughart
This water would probably pull relatively concentrated salts below their
physiologically safe level (e.g. sodium, potassium, calcium), making it not
useful for leeching out toxic stuff which is usually at a very low
concentration. In other words, it would be very non-specific.

~~~
kordless
People with high blood pressure need salts to be leeched out of their system,
interestingly enough.

~~~
daughart
But not salts like calcium and magnesium, which are essential. As far as I
know sodium is the only salt that influences blood pressure.

