Distilled Water?

Hi Everyone!

It's been forever since I've been to this site...time slipping by and busyness has kept me away.

I was having a parrot conversation with someone yesterday and she asked me if I gave Oliver distilled water and was shocked to learn I did not. Do you? This is the first I've ever heard of this. Oliver is 4 years old and lives the life of a king. He eats a wide variety fresh fruits, veggies, beans and drinks regular filtered tap water. He is gorgeous and well behaved. My previous bird, (Cockatiel) also drank filtered tap water and lived to 23 years old.

Thank you for any insight you can give me... Lisa

Probably going to get a wide variety of opinions! I give mine purified water from a local "water store." It is reverse osmosis that undergoes several additional processes but is not distilled. While most tap water in the U.S. will not make you or an animal sick, there are variations in the degree of hardness, and various impurities you may or may not care about. Most districts publish a periodic summary of testing that includes what may have been waived from federal standard.

I have heard bottled water companies are lightly regulated, less so than city or municipal districts. Some feel tap water is "safer" than bottled. I have no idea! Some home soft water systems introduce sodium, not a great idea.

The issue AFAIK with distilled water is all of the minerals are removed. Great for your iron to prevent a buildup in the spray nozzles.

Distilled Water has no advantages to it that will provide a healthier water source for Human, Animal, or Bird! Note, that I did not include Fish in that group!

Distilled Water is used in volume for Science and some Manufacturing applications, but its largest application is the making of soft drinks! By use of a 'distilling' process, different 'source' waters can be used anywhere in the world that with the additional of the 'selected chemicals' can create the same flavored drink.

An expensive choice for drinking water for Humans, Animals, or Birds!

Get your water from that small city North of Tampa (Zephyrhills), which is known for its Spring Water and you and your Parrots will be fine.

Early Death Comes From Drinking Distilled Water

Interesting!

Disclaimer: Nerd alert. Some questions don't have simple answers.

The kind of distilled water used in labs has been through additional purification. Highly purified distilled water is an aggressive solvent because of the hydrogen bonds formed by the, um, hydrogen atoms. The oxygen atom really wants all the electrons, so it drags them away from the hydrogens, so the hydrogens get lonely and try to meet up with some new electrons. Usually that would be the hydrogen atoms on another H2O molecule. That
is what makes water so incompressible - the molecules are drawn very tightly together already - and what gives it the surface tension to bead up. Plain water is a very good cleaning agent!

With very pure water, the water molecules will attach to whatever is around, especially metals. You might be surprised to learn that calcium is a metal. In fact, most elements are metals! Here is a slightly nerdy link:
https://sciencenotes.org/list-metals/

The distilled water you buy at the store is nowhere near this pure. It won't cause any health problems. Don't be scared by anecdotal, non-double blind, non-peer reviewed "studies". Someone who is drinking only distilled water may also be doing something else they read in a health magazine, where these countertop distillation units are heavily advertised, such as consuming a supplement - these are not required to be tested for purity.

It's not possible that the distilled water in Coke is causing health problems, because once you put all the sugar, fructose, and phosphoric acid into it it's not distilled water any more! The phosphoric acid that gives sodas the tart flavor is much more worrisome.

The bigger problem with distilled water is microorganisms.

Tap water is treated with chlorine and other stuff, tested, then piped to the house with enough residual chlorine to keep germs from multiplying. Bottled spring water or distilled water doesn't have chlorine. Random tests often turn up high levels of contamination in these water sources. So what to do?

It depends on your water. If you tap water is highly chlorinated - smells strong, burns your eyes in the shower - it can be put into a clean container and allowed to sit for 24 hours, most of the chlorine will evaporate. Might be good to cover the top with clean loose paper towel etc. to keep crap from falling in the water. Then keep in fridge, with lid.

We get our water from a well, and it contains a coliform bacteria, not e. coli but not something we want to drink, either. And it's hard as heck. We run it through a water softener, which makes it very salty, then pump that into a holding tank fitted with a small chlorinator because the toilet tanks etc. were getting bacterial growth. The chlorine precipitates out any residual iron as well. Then we put the drinking water through a reverse osmosis system which makes good tasting water. The RO system has to be regularly disinfected.

We also got a UV sterilizer (quartz tube surrounded by UV light source inside metal jacket) for the water, but had problems with it. Our water is so hard that it was fogging up the quartz tube rendering the thing ineffective. UV doesn't kill organisms, but it screws with the DNA so they can't reproduce.

What you give your bird depends on the water available to you. If you have good tasting tap water, maybe have it tested at a good water quality lab - find out who the local water company uses - and then everybody can drink that. You want to be sure they look for pseudomonas as well as coliforms, and check for lead.

If your water is stinky, you might have to buy bottled tap water. But you can't assume every bottle of that will be pure. You can get a small UV sterilizer made for camping, treat the birdie's water, then keep it in the fridge. They aren't expensive and last a long time. One of them is the Steri-pen. When I've gone camping, I filter the water I find through a small hand pump filter, then zap it with the steri-pen, and I've never gotten sick at all.

I had to learn more than I wanted to learn about water treatment because of our situation. Sorry for typing so much, but this was all new info to me when I found it, and maybe it will be helpful to someone. Send a PM if you want to talk offline, would be glad to pass along some links and references and how we solved the various problems.

A bit more to add to Dr Kentuckienne's post

Q & A: dangerous distilled water? | Department of Physics | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

https://www.quora.com/Do-they-use-distilled-water-in-sodas

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientschap12.pdf?ua=1

Check your local water supplier for information basically

BTW worth considering what metal your water pipes (on private land) are constructed of, that supplies your personal supply, ie lead should be replaced.

plumsmum2005 said:

BTW worth considering what metal your water pipes (on private land) are constructed of, that supplies your personal supply, ie lead should be replaced.

Click to expand...

Absolutely! Some local schools were found to have frighteningly high levels of lead in drinking water due to old pipes. Supposedly the secondary lining to protect leaching from weld seams had worn away. Ironically the issue was first discovered when a dog became ill from drinking water placed in a bowl at the school.

Taking this one step further, I used to use tap water until my pipes developed pinhole leaks. Long story short, the builder used copper piping with the thinnest wall allowable by code. In my neighborhood it took less than a decade of hard water + chlorine and ammonia residue to etch holes, and in some cases create catastrophic breaks. I've had two major leaks, the house next door has had three... a pipe under the slab to feed the kitchen center island broke days ago. Will take about a month to fix and restore. These homes are just 13 years old!!

Rather than re-pipe, I chose to epoxy-line the interior of all pipes. There is a high likelihood the coating contains potentially nasty plastic toxins such as BPA. Despite research claiming it is safe to drink, I'm not comfortable with the possibility of contamination. Hence, I purchased six five-gallon BPA-free plastic jugs and fill them from a nearby water store. One in each bird-room, (with a dispenser tap) one placed into a heating/cooling dispenser for humans, and three in reserve to re-fill. I make the trek to the store roughly every 10 to 12 days.

Who knows, I may just be deluding myself!!

Karen, what is your opinion of Alkaline Water? Somewhat faddish and expensive, allegedly de-acidifies the body to return to a more appropriate PH state.

Wow. Some awesome answers on here. Loving the nerd factor on this thread! Don't have much to say, save that checking the quality of your local tap water is a very good idea. Some areas actually have excellent reputations for their water quality. If your tap water is good, there's probably no need to go the bottled water route. And I personally don't mess with distilled water (well, except for use in my steam cleaner... and to water my son's venus fly-trap, as it apparently requires distilled water.)

I use the tap for my birds.

I use R/O water from the fish store for my vivarium, but everyone else (bird included) drinks straight tap water with nothing more done to it than being left in an open glass pitcher overnight for the chlorine to dissipate off a bit. If your municipal supply adds lots of chlorine (detectable chlorine odor or taste) boiling then sitting out overnight will do the trick. We are fortunate that our local government doesn't fluorinate the water here. Fluoride is nasty stuff and doesn't just dissipate or boil off like chlorine. There may be some kind of home system that will remove it, but Brita and Pur filters and similar brands do not remove it. If you have fluorinated water, it may be a good idea to look into alternatives with no fluoride for yourself and your birds health.

Scott said:

Karen, what is your opinion of Alkaline Water? Somewhat faddish and expensive, allegedly de-acidifies the body to return to a more appropriate PH state.

Click to expand...

Alkaline water, I never heard of it. My initial thought is that the stomach is so acidic that anything alkaline that goes into it will be acidic as well, pronto. But let me do research...

Now, alkaline water...are you trying to get me in trouble? Is this going to be like with the sprouts? DISCLAIMER: THIS IS JUST WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHILE I TRUST ME, YMMV. A superficial scan of published literature on the subject leaves me with this impression: Bunk.

There are two types of "alkaline water" being flogged by vendors, namely 1) water produced by ionizers which claim to induce alkalinity, don't ask me how the induced acidy doesn't cancel it out, and 2) what I would call hard water, water that has picked up or been treated with minerals such as magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium, aluminum, or silica. Of the two, I tend to dismiss water #1 as bunk because science, and water #2 is simply hard water with a higher mineral content. So I confine my denigrating remarks to water #2 as it could be beneficial, whereas water #1 is beneath notice.

Claim #1 of alkaline water proponents: the water helps the body maintain an alkaline state which is more healthful.

It is true that the body prefers to be in a slightly alkaline state, and it creates and maintains this state normally. I did some research about this a year ago. But it's not what you might expect. Surprisingly, acidic foods such as oranges create alkaline products when digested/metabolized, and alkaline foods tend to create/support a more acidic body chemistry. So lists of alkaline/acidic foods to eat should not be based on the acid/base characteristics of the food in its natural state, but in how that particular foodstuff influences body chemistry.

Conclusion: the claim is false, in that alkaline foodstuffs often create a more acidic state in the blood. Also, the amount of acid/base in water is miniscule. It only takes a few molecules of sodium carbonate or whatever to make water alkaline, and that's probably not enough to affect the body one way or the other. You get much higher loads of acid/base/minerals from food than from water. Food is a much more important place to consider acid/base affects on the body and it's beneficial to eat more foods that help create a slightly alkaline (natural) state.

Claim #2: the minerals in alkaline water are beneficial for you. Much more so than ordinary old pH neutral water.

Grawr. Some minerals are good for you, and some are probably good for you, unless you get too much of them, in which case they are bad for you. Ha ha ha I love science. Ok. Here's the scoop. Take silica. There are some - SOME - tests that show a slight protection against certain types of dementia in people who drink water containing silica for many years. Now, this is silica as a trace element, and too much of it in the water is detrimental. The studies are by no means conclusive. Just interesting, as in hey let's study this some more. It often happens that there will be a second study that finds the exact opposite effect, usually because the experimental protocol has been improved. Regardless, there are some minerals you don't want too much of in your water. Aluminum, for example, I prefer not to consume too much aluminum, that's why I don't use aluminum pans. Too much calcium can cause kidney stones. I don't want a kidney stone! Again, you likely get way more minerals from food than from water.

Conclusion: nonsense. Eat mineral rich foods, lots of veggies, don't cook in aluminum especially acidic foods in aluminum, don't drink highly mineralized water if you are prone to kidney stones.

As Michael Pollan says in the title of one of his books: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I will go duck under something protective now.

My kids usually get Poland Spring bottled water...I just don't like the taste of tap.




Jim

Kentuckienne said:

Scott said:

Karen, what is your opinion of Alkaline Water? Somewhat faddish and expensive, allegedly de-acidifies the body to return to a more appropriate PH state.

Click to expand...

Alkaline water, I never heard of it. My initial thought is that the stomach is so acidic that anything alkaline that goes into it will be acidic as well, pronto. But let me do research...

Now, alkaline water...are you trying to get me in trouble? Is this going to be like with the sprouts? DISCLAIMER: THIS IS JUST WHAT I BELIEVE AND WHILE I TRUST ME, YMMV. A superficial scan of published literature on the subject leaves me with this impression: Bunk.

There are two types of "alkaline water" being flogged by vendors, namely 1) water produced by ionizers which claim to induce alkalinity, don't ask me how the induced acidy doesn't cancel it out, and 2) what I would call hard water, water that has picked up or been treated with minerals such as magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium, aluminum, or silica. Of the two, I tend to dismiss water #1 as bunk because science, and water #2 is simply hard water with a higher mineral content. So I confine my denigrating remarks to water #2 as it could be beneficial, whereas water #1 is beneath notice.

Claim #1 of alkaline water proponents: the water helps the body maintain an alkaline state which is more healthful.

It is true that the body prefers to be in a slightly alkaline state, and it creates and maintains this state normally. I did some research about this a year ago. But it's not what you might expect. Surprisingly, acidic foods such as oranges create alkaline products when digested/metabolized, and alkaline foods tend to create/support a more acidic body chemistry. So lists of alkaline/acidic foods to eat should not be based on the acid/base characteristics of the food in its natural state, but in how that particular foodstuff influences body chemistry.

Conclusion: the claim is false, in that alkaline foodstuffs often create a more acidic state in the blood. Also, the amount of acid/base in water is miniscule. It only takes a few molecules of sodium carbonate or whatever to make water alkaline, and that's probably not enough to affect the body one way or the other. You get much higher loads of acid/base/minerals from food than from water. Food is a much more important place to consider acid/base affects on the body and it's beneficial to eat more foods that help create a slightly alkaline (natural) state.

Claim #2: the minerals in alkaline water are beneficial for you. Much more so than ordinary old pH neutral water.

Grawr. Some minerals are good for you, and some are probably good for you, unless you get too much of them, in which case they are bad for you. Ha ha ha I love science. Ok. Here's the scoop. Take silica. There are some - SOME - tests that show a slight protection against certain types of dementia in people who drink water containing silica for many years. Now, this is silica as a trace element, and too much of it in the water is detrimental. The studies are by no means conclusive. Just interesting, as in hey let's study this some more. It often happens that there will be a second study that finds the exact opposite effect, usually because the experimental protocol has been improved. Regardless, there are some minerals you don't want too much of in your water. Aluminum, for example, I prefer not to consume too much aluminum, that's why I don't use aluminum pans. Too much calcium can cause kidney stones. I don't want a kidney stone! Again, you likely get way more minerals from food than from water.

Conclusion: nonsense. Eat mineral rich foods, lots of veggies, don't cook in aluminum especially acidic foods in aluminum, don't drink highly mineralized water if you are prone to kidney stones.

As Michael Pollan says in the title of one of his books: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I will go duck under something protective now.

Click to expand...

Yep it sure was! Oh IMO!

Oh wow...thank you all for the unbelievable responses. My conclusion is I'm fine with the filtered tap! I'm so glad I reached out to all of you because my earlier hunch (before reaching out to you) was the hysteria produced by the parrot acquaintance seemed over the top. I was right. Thank you! Lisa