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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1627 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 26, 2026

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I've at least heard this claim uncited before. Isn't reverse osmosis filtering pretty ubiquitous on ships these days? I'm not aware of any literature suggesting major health impacts from this to sailors or long-term cruise passengers, for example. But maybe tossing in a multivitamin wouldn't be terrible.

ETA: I assume desalination plants like those in the news in the Middle East also use RO.

I got it from chemistry teachers and people working in labs. It might just be something they say to keep people from drinking it. Just like the story that the lab ethanol is treated with something that makes you puke, so that students won't steal it for their parties.

Just like the story that the lab ethanol is treated with something that makes you puke

But that's real. They add bitterants and sometimes toxic chemicals to lab ethanol. They purposefully contaminate it.

To be fair, lab ethanol probably will make you puke (eventually).

According to the research I remember it's more like "don't drink distilled water regularly" than "one glass and you suffer", and only the latter story would make sense as being made up so students don't drink lab-quantities of it.

As for technical ethanol, pretty sure they do treat it to taste foul at least.

"Ethanol" in a school chemistry lab is probably meths - the duty on drinkable pure alcohol is pretty high, even if not marketed for drinking. Adding 5-10% methanol makes the alcohol too toxic to drink and therefore unattractive to drinkers. We were all warned about this in no uncertain terms before doing an experiment with the stuff.

In the UK, they don't add anything additional to meths to make it unpalatable, so ocasionally tramps and suchlike posion themselves by drinking it. Meths sold to the general public as a fuel/cleaning product is died purple to discourage accidental drinking. But a school science lab is going to be using "industrial methylated spirits" - i.e. an ethanol/methanol mix with nothing else added to it that could affect the chemistry. (Of all the chemicals in my school lab, this was oddly the only one they needed a licence to buy).

I'm not sure about the situation in the US.

Most alcohol poisoning in the US is using homebrew that was messed up somehow. Sometimes this is a fungal contamination and sometimes it's making methanol instead of ethanol. Industrial alcohol contains something to render it undrinkable, but this is normally gasoline rather than methanol.

We are talking about replacing your daily water intake entirely. I agree that the claim seems unlikely when you consider it seriously though. The more relevant question is why would you want to distill your drinking water in the first place?

My local groundwater was contaminated and has been the focus of a regional cleanup effort over decades, with the cleanup pumps are still actively filtering the water. About half of my neighbors have both water softening and a undersink RO system for their families. It wasn't that expensive compared to buying bottled or delivered water either, about $300 for the RO system and ~$150 in yearly replacement filters.

At least some people are using distillation or reverse osmosis for desalination. I'd do that too if my only water supply was the ocean.

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