Grandma once warned us: “Don’t drink distilled water.” But why? And why is this warning wrong?

Rain is water that condenses after evaporating. This is precisely the process that occurs during distillation. Rain is essentially distilled water and has provided drinking water for animals and humans for millennia.

When rainwater falls on ripe fruit, for example, the natural process of establishing a saturation equilibrium draws water through the fruit’s peel into the interior. This process is called osmosis. Since the internal substances cannot pass back out through the skin because they are too large, more and more water penetrates the fruit – until it bursts. Grandma saw this and warned us about it.

What she didn’t consider is that the water we drink immediately mixes with saliva, stomach acid, food pulp, and minerals, thus creating a saturation equilibrium.

And if Grandma had observed that cats and dogs prefer to drink pure rainwater, even preferring it to tap water, and that they live healthy lives, she would have known: Drinking distilled water, rainwater, or pure spring water is not harmful but rather healthy for the body.

Reverse osmosis water is not distilled water; it’s produced through a different filtration process, and it’s purer. The reverse osmosis filtration process also removes distillate components such as oxyacids, essential oils, and hydrosols. [How osmosis and reverse osmosis work]