[permaculture] distilled water

Toby Hemenway toby at patternliteracy.com
Fri Oct 3 14:33:41 EDT 2008


sinergyinaction at netscape.net wrote:
>  So Toby, from what you and others write, are you implying that you would not drink either solar or machine distilled water or even reverse osmosis for long periods of time or, actually, as your basic water supply?
> If not, then what would the next best solution be (is) , if you have only tap water available (and prefer not to drink it)?

Thinking permaculturally, I'd say: it depends. Drink the best quality 
water that is available. What is "best" will depend on who and where you 
are and what your beliefs are. Blanket prescriptions are not helpful 
here. My own guesstimate is that filtered tapwater is probably healthier 
than distilled unless your tapwater is really filthy. Here in Portland, 
we have some of the cleanest tapwater of any city in the nation, from a 
mountain reservoir near Mount Hood. It's treated only with chlorine and 
ammonia. I use a double filter that is supposed to reduce chloramine 
content to two orders of magnitude below recommended levels, and I am 
comfortable with that. If I weren't comfortable drinking filtered 
tapwater, I'd use reverse osmosis, which is not as pure as distilled. If 
I weren't in a city I'd use rainwater or find spring or well water that 
was clean. I'd really prefer to drink living water that's run through a 
flow form or out of a clean stream, but that's a little tough right now.

Why not use Google to find out about trialomethanes? That's how I'd look 
it up.

Rain Tenaqiya wrote:
> I don't understand how distilled water will not increase the removal of wastes, but does increase the removal of nutrients.  It seems that the body-as-filter analogy is being criticized in the first case, but utilized in the second.  How can water leach out nutrients if it is not just flowing through us?
>  
Excellent, Rain! I saw that potential confusion as I was writing, but 
didn't have all day to address it. Some of the water that we drink does 
indeed just pass through us as if we were a filter, but not all. By the 
time the water we drink is metabolized or passes through our body, it 
bears little resemblance to what went in: It's been picking up 
metabolites along the way, it's gone repeatedly in and out of cells, 
tissues, organs, and membranes, and much of it isn't even the same 
molecules that came in--it's H20 that came off of chemical reactions in 
our bodies. So I can't see any scientific basis or mechanism for 
distilled water being more efficient at removing wastes than other 
relatively clean water, such as good spring or tapwater.

But the critical point for me, and the original issue in this thread, is 
the large body of evidence showing that distilled water leaches 
nutrients. One way that it does that is through messing up the osmotic 
pressure around our cells. Water lacking minerals has a higher osmotic 
pressure than distilled water. When our cells are bathed in distilled 
water, minerals from inside the cells must be excreted out of the cells 
to equilibrate the concentration of minerals outside the membrane. The 
high osmotic pressure from distilled water forces osmotic pumping of 
minerals out of the cells, especially out of critical nutrient 
absorption areas like the small and large intestine, where indeed some 
of the water we drink does just pass directly through. Tapwater or other 
water containing minerals won't force this loss of intracellular 
minerals as much.

> I'm especially interested in all this because I've been drinking only rainwater 

Remember that rainwater is far from distilled. I've seen several studies 
that show hefty concentrations of nutrients in rainwater. One study I 
recall showed that a New Hampshire forest was receiving 8 kg/Ha per year 
of calcium from rainwater. So drinking rainwater is not at all like 
drinking distilled.

Water is truly miraculous stuff (well, I suppose everything is, when you 
think about it).

Toby



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