Pipe water, rain water, distilled water, deionized water. All drinkable. All are hypotonic. Drinking hypotonic liquids does not cause your cells to burst.

Nobody pees pure distilled water, so minerals are leaving your body all the time. If you switch from drinking pipe water to distilled water, you're reducing your mineral intake, but only very slightly. No pipe water contains even remotely the same concentration of minerals as urine.

You get minerals from your food too. In fact, practically all your mineral intake comes in your food.



http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health...s/en/index.html

No it won't kill you.

Yes distilled water is hypotonic. But so is pipe water. Pipe water has some minerals, but not that much. Hypotonic does not mean toxic.

If you drink pure distilled water your entire life, you will not die, or even get sick. Because you're still eating. And most of the minerals your body needs comes from your food, not from the plain water you drink.

Once the water you drink enters your body, it is absorbed into your blood stream. It is not kept separate. So the proposed experiment with soaking your hand in water is irrelevant. Your cells in your body will not be floating around in a solution of pure distilled water.

So, if drinking water is hypotonic, why does it not cause all your cells to die? The answer is obvious. Don't drink so much water all in one go. If you drink 4L of water all in one go, you might get water intoxication and die. But why would you want to drink so much water? Your body has a built in mechanism to control the balance of water and ions in your body. Everyone has it from birth. Trust your thirst reflex. It's worked well for billions of people for thousands of years.

My point is pipe water has so little mineral, it is nearly identical to distilled water. At least when it comes to nutrition and tonicity.