this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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My brother had a kid and I always feel like some out of touch old man when we talk about it. Once he told me todlers can only have distilled water and I had to stop myself from going "Back in my day, my parents gave me tap water and I turned out fine!"
I thought distilled water was bad for humans to consume as it leeches nutrients from you?
That'd be deionized water, I think...
Nope, distilled water has nothing, no minerals or anything else, including ions. Deionized water is also not the best for consumption.
But distilled is perfectly safe to drink… it just tastes weird from the lack of minerals and other stuff.
For once, yes. But exclusively? It'll extract minerals from your body, causing health issues.
Especially shit.
Source?
Osmosis
Pretty sure that’s not how it works. Water is mixed with a soup of stuff the moment it goes in your body, and our digestive system/diet is not as simple as osmotic pressure pushing water into cells (and somehow pushing other substances out?) if that’s what you’re getting at.
It doesn’t strip minerals, it just doesn’t replace them, eat enough salty foods and it’s a non issue. Distilled isn’t stripping stuff, it just doesn’t replenish it.
So your source is what…? Some smart ass comment that you don’t even comprehend yourself? Provide an actual source if you think that’s what is the issue.
Source for the salty foods? Salt in food is normally sodium chloride, not the calcium or magnesium which you need to replenish.
You don’t drink milk or take a multivitamin, veggies, fruits? There’s lots of sources, it doesn’t strip, so you don’t need to eat extra.
Can't find it right now, lots of articles online about electrolyte imbalance causing issues, but none linked to an actual source.
Yeah there’s a reason for that… distilled doesn’t strip, so there won’t be any source that corroborates that statement.
That's reverse osmosis water. It's not dangerous but itself but if you only drink it you may be hydrated but missing essential minerals that you usually get dissolved in water.
I remember hearing the reason DI water may not necessarily be potable js it's only free of salts/ion and may still have microorganisms or other biologically dangerous contaminates.
ETA: https://peerj.com/preprints/181.pdf
Tap water doesn't exactly have loads of electrolytes. I think though the normal advice is to give small children boiled water to protect them from water borne illnesses
It's probably more important in places with less safe water
Yeah, it's to protect them from disease. In almost all circumstances a place with tap water from a municipal source is fine.
Premature infants might be advised to only get sterile water for a bit as an extra precaution, and people might also hold off a little longer on well water.
I thought that it was deionized water, not distilled water that strips your body from minerals
What. That can't be true. Maybe there's some advantage, like less fluoride etc. But it's not true they can't drink rap water...
Maybe they live in Flint Michigan 🤷♂️
Well, sure, not all tap water is potable for adults either. But giving special water to toddlers sounds like overzealous parenting. I rather give tap water, which is totally safe here, than water from a plastic bottle.
I was just being facetious lol.
Not everything that is safe for adults is safe for little ones. Honey, for example, has to be boiled.
While boiling should work the medical recommendation is no honey at all until 1y.
Babies, babies can't have tap water.
~6 months you start with cooled boiled water.
~12 months you can move onto tap water.
That also depends on where you live and on the quality of the tap water. Doctor here now recommend you to use tap water also for formula - without boiling it first.
wait, how did babies back in the day (~1000s years ago) survive?
Sporadically
By and large, they didn't
You have 10 or 15 kids and three or four of them will tough it out enough to grow up. There's a reason the population exponentially exploded around the time antibiotics and vaccines were invented.
Breast milk
On breast milk
Across Europe there's different recommendations in every country, and no evidence of different illness/mortality rates related to the recommendation.
France says tap water is safe for all ages.
If you're in the US, I totally get why you might want to keep boiling your water, but remember that boiling doesn't remove lead.
The US has a water system effectively comparable to the ones across Europe, FYI. That includes lead levels, since it wasn't just the US that used lead pipes.
In most circumstances lead pipes are safe to replace with different materials as part of routine maintenance. It's only very notable incidents where things go wrong that have driven a push for greater haste, since it highlighted the consequences of things going wrong.
Make baby drink boiling water so they're cool. Got it.
I’m pretty sure that’s unhealthy (lack of minerals)
If you only have them distilled water and not the formula you mix into it, then it's dangerous, but the minerals aren't the problem there.
Where would that be? Africa?
That's only if you haven't blessed the rains down in Africa.