Last Christmas, we purchased our second distiller (from Nutriteam.com), after spending all of 2017 drinking and cooking only with distilled water. Now, every night, when the electricity is half price, the two machines drip away producing 8L (2 gallons) of pure water.
Nonetheless, we weren’t always so convinced that distilled water was safe, no less healthy. As a reader asked last week:
…not re-adding minerals back to the water, such as pink salts, wouldn’t that drain the body of good minerals / electrolytes? I am hearing different things on this matter myself, and confused to say the least.
That matter certainly confused us for some time. Then, one day, we were visited by an extraterrestrial who told us that distilled water would save the people of the world from certain extinction. Here’s photographic proof of our close encounter:
Okay, I admit, that’s actually a photo of our son, Jonah, wearing a water distiller, starring in the forthcoming Hollywood remake of the The Day the Earth Distilled.
Back to Earth, the world wide web (and even the sides of some bottles of distilled water) are littered with warnings like this headline from Mercola.com: Early Death Comes From Drinking Distilled Water.
While others, like Alexendar Graham Bell, are oft quoted as saying: “I have kept up my drinking of distilled water and I attribute my almost perfect health largely to it.”
Personally, for me, the idea that pure water would somehow be dangerous seems quite odd. Stranger still is the idea that adding inorganic minerals (e.g. dirt containing heavy metals) would somehow make it healthier. I agree with researchers, such as Andrew Norton Webber, that the only minerals distilled water is pulling out are the toxic ones (e.g. inorganic calcium, mercury, cadmium, etc.) which may contribute to diseases like type-1 diabetes and kidney failure.
Indeed, even the science section of the New York Times agrees, citing two Cornell University professors who concluded that “[distilled water] is safe, and it does not leach out minerals…” They also said the lack of minerals in the water was of no concern since “minerals are not in short supply in the United States diet, and water is not a significant source of minerals anyway.”
A few years back, Nicole, on the way to dialysis, slipped on ice and fell down three porch steps and hit the pavement really hard. The next day (Christmas Eve, in fact) she was in the big city having surgery on her left leg, which had shattered and broken in three different places. In contrast, a few months ago, after a year on distilled water, she had a similar accident. She fell down five steps of stairs and onto solid pavement. Other than painful soft tissue damage, a bone was not even cracked.
Sure looks like all that distilled water hasn’t left her body lacking for calcium and phosphorous.
Thinking Outside the T1D Matrix,
–John C. A. Manley
P.S. Page 63-64 of Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting shares examples of vibrantly healthy cultures that thrive off distilled (rain) water. These include the people of the Isle of Capri, Polynesia, Bermuda and the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It’s available from amazon.com, amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk.
P.P.S. Distilled water is also criticized for containing too much carbon dioxide. This may actually be a positive, not a negative. As I’ve written about before, the benefits of CO2 may be one of the biggest health secrets of our time. You can read my previous my post – CO2 to the Rescue – to find out why.
