'Osmolarity' and Reverse Osmosis

At my last visit my doctor (yes, the one with the water alkalizer) told me that it was incredibly important to have sufficient 'osmolarity' in your drinking water.

We were discussing the importance of trace minerals at the time, and he made the point that the osmolarity of our water was extremely important. Not wanting to appear stupid, I agreed, and rushed home to Google 'osmolarity'.

To cut a long story short (and it is a long story) the need for osmolarity is another way of saying you need minerals at a certain level in your drinking water.


Cassie and I discussed it as we were preparing dinner, and Cassie suggested I look up the relationship between reverse osmosis and osmolarity. She thought there was a common root to the word - so a search might teach us something.

So I did. I searched on 'reverse osmosis and osmolarity' and we found something extremely interesting right here. It appears that according to "Introduction to General, Organic and Biochemistry" By Frederick A. Bettelheim, William H. Brown, Mary K. Campbell, and Shawn O. Farrell, distilled water can have a profoundly bad effect on red blood cells. here's a pic to demonstrate.

Now here's the big news, direct from the Professors' pen:

"What would happen if we suspended red blood cells in distilled water instead of in plasma? Inside the red blood cells the osmolarity is approximately the same as in a physiological saline solution - .30 osmol.  Distilled water has ZERO OSMOLARITY (Ian's). As a consequence, water flows into the red blood cells. The volume of the cells increases, and as they swell.... the membrane cannot resist the osmotic pressure and the red cells eventually burst, spilling their contents into the water. We call this process hemolysis."

So where does this leave you with regard to your drinking water?
Obviously you are not simply dumping your red blood cells into your drinking water, but you are actually dumping at least some of your drinking water into your blood. After all, blood is mostly water. So dumping zero osmolarity water into the blood cannot be a healthy practice, and both distilled water and pure Reverse osmosis water have zero osmolarity. 

Dr Zoltan Rona wrote an article some time ago on the hazards of distilled water, saying that it has the ability to dilute your body's ratio of minerals to fluid. This adds more light to the subject, reveals another potential effect, and shows that zero osmolarity water, while pure, is NOT what our body wants.

(Yes, we do sell the AlkaPure, a Reverse Osmosis system, but we've added an alkaline mineral cartridge after the RO process to remineralise and therefore 're-osmolise' the water.)