Response to: Dasani Bottled Water Has 4 Ingredients: Tap Water, Known Teratogen, Lethal Drug, and Salt
Now this article is so ridiculous I had to check the site wasn't a joke like the Dihydrogen Monoxide website.
First error: Dasani does not include tap water. Instead Dasani is de-ionized water produced by forcing tap water through a synthetic membrane (reverse-osmosis) to produce 100% pure water (H2O). Plus magnesium sulphate, potassium chloride, and salt (sodium chloride).
Second error: Not considering the toxic properties of salt and water. All substances can be toxic when consumed to excess including water and salt it just depends on the amount consumed.
Third error: Not stating the concentrations in Dasani or used in the various applications of the different chemicals.
Now unfortunately I was unable to find the exact concentrations of the other ingredients but I will assume they are similar to other 'Table Waters' (non-spring bottled water) based on this report.
Magnesium : 2-20mg/L = 99mg/L magnesium sulphate
Potassium : 2-5mg/L = 10mg/L potassium chloride
Sodium : 5-70mg/L = 178mg/L sodium chloride
H2O: 0.8-1kg/L (by definition one litre is exactly one kilogram of pure water).
Now since toxicity is increases with dose, I will assume the highest of these concentrations.
Now to determine which ingredient poses the greatest risk, toxicity is quantified using LD50 the dose that would be lethal to 50% of a specified population measures as quantity of chemical per kg of body mass. Note all of these are based on Oral consumption of the product (eating/drinking it) not injecting it. In general, there are limits to absorption in the digestive tract so that if a chemical is over-consumed most of it will not be absorbed so a much larger dose is necessary to get the same concentration in the bloodstream than if you inject it. So drinking the potassium chloride solution used in lethal injection (9500 mg) would only be lethal if you weighed less than 4 kg.
Magnesium Sulphate: 482 mg/kg (for epsom salts which is magnesium sulphate + 7 water molecules) = 0.235 g/kg for magnesium sulphate.
Potassium Chloride: 2.5 g/kg
Sodium Chloride: 3.75 g/kg
Considering an average sized person (~ 60kg) they would have to drink 143 L of bottled water to reach the toxicity level for magnesium sulphate, 1264 L for sodium chloride, and a whopping 15000 L for potassium chloride. Drinking that amount of water is physically impossible without bursting your digestive system.
In contrast, it only takes about 1.5L of water to kill a 5 year-old child. And drinking 4 L of water over only 2 hours can kill an adult. Even less is required if the person is also doing strenuous activity (because the kidneys process less water while exercising).
Chronic exposure or build up are not an issue either since all of these chemicals dissolve into ions in water and are easily excreted. In fact complete absence of any of them would be lethal as well.
Thus by far the largest risk in drinking Dasani is H2O.
Post Script (really dumb things from the article):
Quote: "On its own, anhydrous magnesium sulfate is a drying agent. (Side note:
Could this explain the strange dry mouth I experience after drinking
Dasani water?"
Why this is dumb: anhydrous means 'without water' which is obviously not the case for magnesium sulphate which is dissolved in water! Magnesium sulphate is a drying agent because it can form crystals with water molecule (one of their later examples of bath salts is one of these) and thus lock away water to dry something. Dissolved magnesium sulphate is not even a crystal anymore so it can't lock any water away thus has no drying properties.
Quote: "I personally choose to avoid water with additives."
Why this is dumb: Dasani actually contains fewer different chemicals than natural spring water or regular tap water because it has been de-ionized. Natural spring water and tap water contain trace amounts of tons of different chemicals because water dissolves pretty much everything it flows over or through (unless it is coated in fat or plastic). Rocks, soil, and particularly city streets contain tons of stuff including heavy metals (arsenic, lead, etc...), ions like flouride, fertilizers & pesticide run-off, urine & fecal matter of various animals, etc.... (a table with detected contaminants for various bottled spring & mineral waters can be found here).
Quote: "anytime you separate a chemical compound from their natural food
sources, they may behave differently than they would in their natural
forms. That’s why it’s very difficult to overdose on bananas, but much
easier to overdose on potassium chloride."
Why this is dumb: elements can behave differently depending on what molecule they are incorporated into (eg. molecules of chlorine bound to itself makes mustard gas but chlorine interacting with sodium makes table salt). but chemical compounds (aka molecules & ionic compounds) always behave the same regardless of their source. If you purify potassium chloride from a banana and inject it into someone at high doses it will kill them as certainly as potassium chloride derived from minerals. But, potassium citrate (potassium + citric acid) is different from potassium chloride (potassium + chlorine), but if you were to dissolve both of them in water the resulting potassium ions (potassium minus one electron) would behave identically.
Quote: "While one bottle of Dasani water may not have much salt, if you drink
six or seven bottles of Dasani water in one day, suddenly the amount
could be much higher."
Why this is dumb: the concentration of salt in Dasani or any bottled water is much lower than that of your blood or inside your cells (about 3000mg/L). So drinking too much Dasani water could only cause problems of insufficient sodium as a result of you peeing-out more salt than you are absorbing from the water. Added salt is a problem in food because food is made from the cells of other organism which are usually cooked or dried which removes much of the water from them -> thus the concentration of salt is already higher than that of your blood.
