The Dangerously Clean Water Used To Make Your iPhone

http://www.fastcompany.com/1750612/dangerously-clean-water-used-make-your-iphone

by mef • 12 years ago

9 10 12 years ago

kordless2• 12 years ago

I wonder if there is a good medical use for this? Leaching things out of one's body is sometimes desired.

daughart4• 12 years ago

This water would probably pull relatively concentrated salts below their physiologically safe level (e.g. sodium, potassium, calcium), making it not useful for leeching out toxic stuff which is usually at a very low concentration. In other words, it would be very non-specific.

kordless2• 12 years ago

People with high blood pressure need salts to be leeched out of their system, interestingly enough.

theandrewbailey• 12 years ago

It might cause water retention issues before leaching anything out.

danelectro2• 12 years ago

Wrong.

Water does not become dangerous when it is more pure.

I've been drinking distilled bottled water for decades, and I'm not the only one. I have been making ultrapure for decades too, which is biologically equivalent to distilled as far as (lack of) minerals go.

As far as I can tell, the noise about leaching beneficial minerals from the body arose with the popularity of bottled spring water and drinking water which require less expensive processing (or no processing at all for some grades from some sources) but sell for the same price as distilled water.

Discouragement was needed otherwise too many consumers would be drinking the distilled.

I could put down thousands of words about this, but Ozarka has some good waters, most consumers would be able to find one of their grades which is as good or better than what they are getting now. The test results speak for themselves:

http://www.nestle-watersna.com/asset-library/Documents/O_ENG...

There is not a significant difference in mineral nutrition between their grades, unless you were grossly deficient in your diet for a mineral which is present in one grade but not in another.

The simple answer is you need to be getting your minerals from some place other than your water.

The dirty little secret about industrial ultrapure water is that it usually tastes funny because there is something left over from the processing that is undetectable with today's limited technology, but that the olfactory & taste buds can notice.

Ultrapure is best an application-specific process, for some purposes it can be an unsolved mystery where once you purify it enough for superior performance in the application, you still don't have an exact handle on why it wasn't superior at other times. And once it works industrially, you are supposed to think it is so pure nothing could ever be detected. Handling the purification and QA steps in a superstitiously-slanted way from that point on is sometimes the best functional approach.

EDIT: here's another worthwhile citation -

http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/f/Can-You-Drink...

feld• 12 years ago

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on the subject, but the point that they're making is that the UPW is literally only made of H2O. Nothing else. Nada. And so it will act as a solvent.

You don't want to drink a solvent.

I'm pretty sure Ozark isn't selling a drinking water equivalent to a solvent.

daughart4• 12 years ago

Ozarka's own documents detail the mineral contents of their water. Ultra pure water by definition has no mineral content. You cannot buy ultra pure water in a grocery store. It's (relatively) expensive to produce water this pure. You have never consumed ultra pure water, I can guarantee it. I work in a specialized lab and our water is only down to 4 ppb, basically murky compared to this stuff.

danelectro2• 12 years ago

Sorry about that.

Didn't intend to be disagreeable, but I'm not drinking the kool-aid on this one, water can not be too clean to drink, the article is a drama piece based on a false "fact".

Also must apologize for saying ultrapure is "biologically" equivalent when I meant dietarily equivalent for most people.

There can easily be germs or trace minerals even in commercial distilled water which could interfere with biological cultures causing difficulties which would not be a problem when using ultrapure.

Here's a good test sheet for the kind of ultrapure used to rate other waters for trace elements:

http://www.emdmillipore.com/US/en/product/Q-POD-Element,MM_N...

The commonly consumed solvent that I want to be careful about is alcohol.

Water, OTOH is the solvent of life. A healthy solvent no doubt.

Solvent strength and solubility calculations show complete dependence on relative concentrations of solutes, let's look at the math.

Take for example magnesium, in blood this is often the lowest in concentration of the routine electrolytes tested, and there's no doubt the right amount of magnesium is good for the health.

"Drinking" water is Ozarka's grade having highest magnesium at about 3.9mg/L max. People love this stuff. Me too when I can't get distilled. But you're SOL depending on this popular typical drinking water for magnesium completely, you need another source.

One liter of their distilled water can have 0.1mg max of Mg. (usually way less, but no need to test it any more sensitively since it's not ultrapure or anything exotic)

Ultrapure at 0.0000004mg typical per liter is what we're talking about for reference.

The cleaner the water the better the reference.

Great discrepancy here but the take away is that all these figures are inadequate sources of magnesium compared to what you need.

In typical patients urine is draining about 6 - 10 mEq/day, or 73 to 122mg/day, for an average of 97mg/day.

Now suppose you drink in 2 liters and it ends up flowing out at 97mg/day:

Ozarka Drinking water has some (palatable) magnesium in it, so you lose less, at 89mg

With their distilled you lose more, at least 97mg

with ultrapure you would lose the most, almost the whole 97mg

The RDA for magnesium is 310 to 420mg/day of which 350mg is recommended as maximum from supplements. The difference between typical drinking water magnesium content and deionized (distilled or ultrapure) is about 8mg/day when you are supposed to be consuming at least 38x that difference per day. If you're not getting that much magnesium your nutrition may not be the best, and if you are getting the RDA then the 8mg delta is not much more than rounding error. The 8mg is also a low fraction of the normal 49mg loss range from 73 to 122mg/day, and a small fraction of the full RDA.

I'm not making this up they way they are getting their facts in the article.

Distilled is a very good solvent, especially for minerals, put it in your windshield washer tank and you can see the difference.

Delicious too, try some blind testing.

No affiliation wih Ozarka on my part either.

Not a full 1000words, but hope this helps.

The Dangerously Clean Water Used To Make Your iPhone

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