[permaculture] distilled water

Toby Hemenway toby at patternliteracy.com
Wed Sep 24 15:42:44 EDT 2008


SALS3 wrote:
>  empty pure water iMHO  not only brings more nutrients into the cell 
> but carries away more waist.  I agree other water is to full to pick up 
> waste where as distilled water is pure empty and can hold more waste. 
>
I'm gonna put on my science hat here. Water is capable of holding vast 
quantities of minerals and other compounds. The miniscule amounts of 
minerals in non-distilled water are on the order of one thousandth to 
one millionth of the total that water can hold. For example, salt in 
most tap water is at 5 to 100 parts per million, but water can hold 
260,000 parts per million, or 26% salt. So I have a difficult time 
believing that removing trace amounts of minerals would significantly 
increase water's ability to take away wastes. I suppose from a 
homeopathic point of view, removing every last trace of minerals from 
water might create a "vacuum" that would attract more nutrients to the 
water, but that's not a scientifically supportable hypothesis.

On the other hand, there is good evidence that distilled water 
aggressively attracts minerals (it sure sucks them out of pipes and 
such) and is thought to deplete the body of minerals if used 
extensively. Steve Read's post cites some of the evidence.

There's nothing in nature to suggest that distilled water is good for 
animals to drink. Plants and animals live on non-distilled water (and 
the biodynamics folks consider distilled water to be dead and thus 
harmful to life) so I wouldn't experiment on myself.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



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