Is Pure Distilled Water Safe to Drink?

Ideally, we want our drinking water to be as free from impurities as possible. This means we want it free of foreign chemicals, color, particulate matter, etc. Many people say that you should only drink pure water, ideally distilled water. Is this true? Is purified water better for you? The answer is no, it’s not. And, in fact, drinking water that is actually pure is a bad idea. Read on to find out why.

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What you think of as pure water is probably not pure water. As important as this seems to be to people it’s an impossible dream. Pure water does not exist naturally in nature. I am hoping this revelation will have the desired effect. We’ve survived and evolved for century upon century drinking ‘impure’ water. Water that is absolutely pure is not only not better for us, it’s dangerous; even deadly. Ordinary distilled water, though, like the kind you buy in gallon jugs at your grocery store, or produce at home in a water purifier, is perfectly safe to drink. It will probably also produce a better cup of coffee or tea.

Distillation of Water

Distillation relies on the evaporation of water. This will get rid of inorganic compounds like heavy metals, other trace metals, oxygen, microorganisms, and nitrate. Any non-volatile compound will remain behind.

Simple distillation, though, does not produce perfectly pure water.  Other things evaporate with the water and so join the distilled product. Not all organic compounds are removed. Even some hazardous volatile compounds, which can have boiling points lower than that of water, will evaporate and join the water in the distillate.

So, if you are drinking distilled water, you are not drinking pure water. Steps will have been taken in commercially distilled water to remove certain undesirable substances, but the point of distilling water is not to produce absolutely pure water, with no other constituents. The same is true of most filtered water: It is not pure water.

Purified Water Is Not Usually Pure

The term purified water does not usually refer to water that is pure. It means water that has been treated for certain impurities. The water you get from your tap has been ‘purified’ to make it safe to drink. It is not pure. Pure water is water that contains nothing other than H₂O. Unless you work in a laboratory, you have probably never encountered anything close to pure water. It is incredibly difficult to produce.

Certainly, drinking purified water is probably better for your health in general, although the bottling process introduces various safety and health considerations, including the introduction of microplastics into the water. But, these confusing terms have caused some people to believe that it is better to drink absolutely pure water. Water that is nothing other than water, containing no dissolved minerals like magnesium or calcium, for instance. Conversely, it has caused other people to think that distilled water is dangerous to drink because they mistakenly believe that distilled water is pure. So, while it is true that absolutely pure water is dangerous to drink, distilled water, since it is not actually pure, is fine to drink.

Ultra-Pure Water

This misuse of the term pure to describe water that isn’t pure has led to other descriptors such as ultra-pure, to describe 100% pure water. Ultra-pure water is water that is devoid of any impurities. It contains nothing but hydrogen and oxygen. This level of purity is rarely produced. Most extremely pure water, or deionized water, is more like 98% pure.

100% Pure Water Is Unstable and Aggressive!

Here’s what you need to know about 100% water: It’s unstable. Water doesn’t seem to like to be pure. Pure, pure water is an incredible solvent. If you send it through the copper pipes in your home, for instance, it will take copper off the pipes and deliver it to you. No charge.

And this reveals why all this talk about pure water is an impossible dream. The more purer water is, the better its ability to attract other molecules to itself. This is due to the arrangement of its hydrogen and oxygen atoms, giving it an opposite charge on both ends. That’s how water is attracted to itself, but also how it is attracted to just about everything else. Truly pure water, even if you can produce it, will start absorbing molecules from any container you put it in. It won’t be pure for long. While there are companies that claim to produce ultra-pure water, I doubt most scientists would buy that it’s actually ultra-pure. Just about anything it comes into contact with will leave some of itself behind.

Regardless, if you drank so-called ultra-pure water for any significant period of time, it would do tremendous damage to your body. It would leech your blood of electrolytes, leading to death. In fact, it would steal pretty much all the minerals from your body. Such pure water has a tremendous ability to draw minerals and other substances into it or to be attracted to areas with high concentrations of minerals. Thus, pure water is a disaster for our bodies. We evolved to drink impure water. Our physiology depends on it.

This should all serve as an adequate explanation, but what of the actual experience of drinking it? I certainly have never tasted it and I don’t know anybody who has, so I had to consult YouTube. Anything that can be done has probably been done on a YouTube video.

Is Pure Water Tasteless?

I found a couple of videos of people tasting pure water. I suspected that one of them was suspect as the person who drank the water said it had ‘no taste whatsoever’ which isn’t actually possible, I don’t think. Yes, I’ll admit that I already had an expectation that pure water would not be tasteless due to the research I had already conducted (more about that revealed below). Anyway, our tastebuds can’t detect water, it’s true, but some taste experience should be expected, for various reasons.

The experience of James Orgill of The Action Lab channel was more revealing. For reference, Orgill holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, so I’m not just using some random guy as a source, but a credentialled one. In this Action Lab video, James set out to show whether or not ‘pure’ water, has a taste. I have embedded the video below:

In his video, James tried Type II Deionized water. The ultra-pure water I’ve been talking about until now is Type 1 water. Type II water is not ultrapure but pure enough to produce interesting results.

It’s true that pure water has no taste whatsoever in that we have no receptors to detect it. Our taste buds aren’t programmed to react to water itself. This doesn’t mean, necessarily, that we detect no taste when we drink it. As James explains, we are used to the taste of our saliva, so we don’t taste it. Skipping all the other stuff he said, as we don’t really need all that to understand this, any change in the concentration of your saliva will produce something you are not used to, thus producing a taste experience.

One study that James seems to have been referencing is a 2017 study in Nature Neuroscience called The cellular mechanism for water detection in the mammalian taste system. ¹Zocchi, Dhruv, et al. “The Cellular Mechanism for Water Detection in the Mammalian Taste System.” Nature Neuroscience, vol. 20, no. 7, 2017, pp. 927–933., doi:10.1038/nn.4575.

If you peruse this study, you may find the central question revealing: How do we recognize and detect water? After all, as humans, or mammals in general, we need a way to know when water is water. If we can’t ‘taste’ it, how do we know? The study results seem to suggest that, indeed, the taste buds do have a role in detecting the ‘taste’ of water, specifically the sour-detecting taste buds.

When the researchers made the sour taste cells in mice sensitive to light, they found that water-deprived mice continually tried to drink from a water bottle emitting blue light but no actual water. Conversely, mice whose sour taste cells were deactivated showed no ability to distinguish between water and non-aqueous fluids, such as oil. According to the researchers, this detection of water through the sour taste buds was due to a change in the pH of saliva as it was diluted by deionized water.

Again, you are used to your own saliva. If you drank pure water, it would dilute your saliva and change the pH. This change is detected, according to the study, through the sour cell receptors on your tongue. In fact, this occurs whenever you drink water, but most water also has dissolved minerals and other stuff in it, which also produces some taste.

When James drank the (almost) pure water, he said that it did not taste bad, but was more bitter than other water. I suspect this bitterness was due to what the water was doing to his mouth. He also experienced a dry sensation in his mouth. His mouth was dryer after he drank the water than before. He detected no ill effects, at first.

The next day, however, he discovered an unpleasant side-effect. Pure water will do nasty things to your cells. There are so many ions in your cells that the pure water, which is hypertonic, will be driven into the cells by osmosis, swelling them to the point of bursting. So, a drink of ultra-pure water can destroy a layer of cells on your tongue or other tissues in your mouth, which will feel like you burned your mouth on hot coffee, or something similar. This is what happened to James. It was not really that painful, he said, but uncomfortable or unpleasant.

As to what drinking pure water continually does to your body, like swelling up your cells, disrupting your electrolyte balance, and leaching minerals from your blood, we have pretty good reasons to believe it’s all true because we can expose cells to pure water and see what happens. However, no, I don’t have any empirical evidence to back it all up. You probably don’t want to test it.

So now we know, distilled water isn’t bad for you or dangerous, pure water is, and we can taste even the purest of pure waters. But, don’t try this at home! I truly do believe the results would be devastating to your body.  How long could you drink it safely? Why I don’t know. Nobody’s ever tried to find out, for obvious reasons.

Key Points Summary for “Is Pure Distilled Water Safe to Drink?”

• Is pure distilled water better for you?
  • No, pure water is not better for you.
  • Drinking truly pure water is actually a bad idea.
  • Drinking absolutely pure water is dangerous.
  • Regular distilled water you buy from stores is safe to drink and can improve the taste of beverages.
• Distillation of Water
  • Distillation removes inorganic compounds but not all organic compounds.
  • Commercially distilled water is safe but not pure.
• Purified Water
  • Pure water does not exist naturally.
  • The term pure for used for commercially bottled water is misused.
  • Purified water is treated for certain impurities, but is not completely pure.
  • Drinking purified water is generally better for health.
• Ultra-Pure Water
  • The term ultra-pure is used to clear up confusion over the word pure
  • Ultra-pure water is 100% pure and rarely produced.
  • Most deionized water is about 98% pure.
  • Ultra-pure water is an incredible solvent.
  • If you send ultra-pure water through the copper pipes in your home  it will take copper off the pipes.
  • Pure water will start attracting and absorbing molecules from anything it comes into contact with, including the container you put it in
  • This explains why pure water is so very rare. 
• Dangers of 100% Pure Water
  • Pure water is unstable and aggressive.
  • Pure water, which is hypertonic, will be driven into the cells by osmosis, swelling them to the point of bursting.
    • A drink of ultra-pure water can destroy a layer of cells on your tongue or other tissues in your mouth, which will feel like you burned your mouth on hot coffee.
    • To have this happen to other cells in your body would be truly disastrous.
  • It can leech minerals from the body, leading to severe health issues.
  • If you drank enough of it, it would leech your blood of electrolytes, leading to death.
  • We evolved to drink impure water. Our physiology depends on it.
• The Taste of Pure Water
  • Pure water has no taste due to the lack of taste receptors for water.
  • However, changes in saliva concentration can produce a taste experience.
    • According to some research, this may be due to our sour taste buds reacting to the Ph change in our saliva.
• Most water has dissolved minerals and other impurities, which also contribute to its taste to some degree.