well, add a bit of sea salt to your food then. all the minerals you need, in the right proportion.
distilled water has its main bonus, as does RO water, from removing all those minerals that you DON’T need. we’re talking arsenate, chromate, selenate, lead, cadmium, antimony, vanadium, etc, as well as a whole host of organic ions, and organic non-ionised material in the water. get rid of the chloramine, get rid of the benzopyrenes, get rid of the dioxins, get rid of the bischlorophenyls, that are the unfortunate byproduct of water running through old pipes after falling through a filthy industrial sky, or are purposely put there to sterilise the water… boiling the water from the tap will remove the chlorine and some of the dissolved organics, but does nothing about the inorganic ion load. it does sterilise the water, though, so there are no bugs in it.
all this scare mongering about hyponatremia is simply rubbish, i have to say. hyponatremia is perhaps a concern if you drink many litres of ANY fresh water, even tap water, doesn’t have to be distilled water, without replacing the salt, as occurs in ecstasy-driven thirst (osmotic water overload in the brain from urinary loss of sodium is about the only reason that people die from ecstasy short of frank overdose), or if you live a long time in salt-deficient areas and sweat excessively with minimal sodium replacement (as a vegetarian no-salt eating traveller along the Kokoda track discovered recently). if you eat normally, then hyponatremia is of absolutely no concern at all, BP, especially if you actually eat some food during the day.
and this whole idea of drinking as much water as possible, rather than as directed by your activity and by thirst, is also a crock of shit cooked up by weater companies trying to sell you more water… companies like Coca Cola. a far more pressing concern than hyponatremia (loss of sodium til it falls below the limits necessary for correct nerve function in the brain) is hypokalemia (loss of potassium til it falls below the level required for correct function of nerves, and more importantly, heart muscle).
hypokalemia is a far more insidious matter, as the dietary sources of potassium are fewer than for sodium. as there is far more sodium in the body than potassium, the kidneys can handle the sodium balance far more easily, even though you unavoidably lose some sodium with each mL of urine made. problem with the potassium is that it is lost in much the same way: unavoidably losing some in each drop of urine, despite the body’s best efforts to retain it. this means that potassium is generally depleted far faster than sodium, and a secondary problem is the role of potassium in the repolarisation phase of the heart beat.
for this reason. many cardiologists lament the worried person with high blood pressure that fronts up to their offices with the inevitable bottle of drinking water… how much do you drink? five litres a day> then you’re hypokalemic, and that leads to water retention, and that leads to kidney malfunction and that leads to a heart attack. that’s not a popular viewpoint on the standard lay persons webpages, though, and water companies try to quash that kind of opinion where they can, and raise all sorts of counter rubbish. a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
No filtering in the world was going to fix that…
