How To Re-Mineralize Water For Drinking

The debate about the health benefits of purified versus distilled water is a hot one. There are those who claim that they feel tons better since switching to distilled water and there are those that claim that distilled water is the devil.

The purpose here isn’t to discuss that debate; it’s simply to provide some options for those who want to know how to re-mineralize water for drinking.

Why Would You Need to Re-Mineralize Water?

Water already has minerals in it, right? Well, yes but not after it’s been distilled or purified using reverse osmosis. Both of those processes remove most of the impurities – up to 99.5% of them – from the water. The purification process is indiscriminate, though. It removes the “good” minerals along with the bad stuff. Proponents of re-mineralizing water advocate the process for a few different reasons.

  1. You need the minerals, especially if you’re not eating properly or you’ve been out in the heat sweating. The primary minerals that your body needs to replenish are calcium, magnesium, potassium and salt, though there are many others, too.
  2. Re-mineralized water quenches thirst better and is absorbed by your body faster. This is a point of contention but the argument for faster hydration states that adding minerals back into the water boosts the pH and brings it back to an alkaline state. The water becomes ionized, which makes the water molecules cluster into smaller groups, which makes it easier for your body to absorb.
  3. Re-mineralized water tastes better. Though this is subjective, it’s true that the human palate is used to the flavor of water with minerals in it. It gives it a fuller flavor (that is to say, it gives it SOME flavor) that many people find preferable to distilled water.

Now that you know WHY some people prefer to re-mineralize water, let’s talk about how to do it. There are a few different ways that you can re-mineralize your water but since we love to do things on a budget, we’re going to discuss the ones that are wallet-friendly.

Buy a Reverse Osmosis System that Re-Mineralizes for You

{adinserter usf}These are available at Home Depot and other home improvement and hardware stores. You can buy under-cabinet systems for your sinks, showers and fridge and they’re fairly affordable. Right now, the one for under the sink runs about $350 at Home Depot and Amazon. This system purifies your water using reverse osmosis then adds calcium and magnesium back into the water.

You can also buy after-market re-mineralizing cartridges to your existing system. Just do a quick search on the internet and you’ll find what you need. They cost about $50. If you can find a less expensive one, please mention it in the comments section below.

Add a Pinch of Celtic or Himalayan Salt to Your Water

Celtic sea salt adds about 80 different vital trace minerals to your water. You want to use the grey kind that sticks to the sides of the container. Himalayan salt is the pink salt that you often see in gourmet stores. It contains about the same number of minerals as Celtic sea salt but they do taste a bit different.

However, since you’re just putting a pinch in your water, taste isn’t going to be an issue. Himalayan salt also has a bit less sodium in it. Use either of these that you would like but stay away from table salt; that stuff is horrible for you.

Pink Salt

Add a Pinch of Pascalite Clay to Your Water to Re-Mineralize It

pascalite-clayThis clay comes from high up in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. It’s classified as a white clay but is actually cream-colored. It’s rich in natural minerals and won’t affect the flavor of your water. Bentonite could work too.

As a side note, Pascalite also has purported medicinal properties including being good for burns, bug bites, infections, rashes, acne, cuts and scrapes. It’s also used in mud bathes for detoxifying and softening skin and can even be used as a natural deodorant or body powder. Native Americans actually called it The Mud That Heals. How’s that for multi-purpose?

Use Mineral Drops or Tablets to Re-Mineralize Your Water

There are actually commercial drops that you can use to add the minerals back in to your water. One brand is ConcenTrace and another is Sea MD. An 8oz bottle of ConcenTrace will run you about 15 bucks on Amazon and it states that it has 72 mineral in it. Sea MD will cost you about $20 for 4oz.

Mineral tablets may be another option for you to consider. You can get 300 ConcenTrace tablets on Amazon for about $23.

Now You Know

As you can see, there are several different methods that you can use to re-mineralize your water. The drops and the tablets are probably your best option for your bug-out bags or to store in your stockpile but for now, the filters or entire system may be more convenient and cost efficient since you don’t have to add something to your water every time that you pour a glass or crack a bottle.

If you’re buying bottled water from a store while you’re out, there are a few brands that are properly re-mineralized including Fiji, Evian, Vittel, Volvic and Trinity. These may be brands that you wish to consider storing in your stockpile if minerals in your water are important to you. It’s certainly the easiest method of re-mineralizing your water though it may not be quite as cost effective – those are some of the pricier brands of bottled water.

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To be honest, most of your minerals come from your food. The only time that minerals in water become seriously important is if you’re not eating a balanced meal that provides all of the nutrients that you need. Even then, the minerals in water are there in trace amounts. If you absolutely can’t afford any of these options, purified water will be fine.

We hope that you’ve learned what you needed from this article. If you have anything that you’d like to add, please let us know what you’re thinking in the comments section below!

This article has been written by Theresa Crouse for Survivopedia.

Written by

Theresa Crouse is a full-time writer currently living in central Florida. She was born and raised in the hills of West Virginia, where she learned to farm, hunt, fish, and live off the land from an early age. She prefers to live off the grid as much as possible and does her best to follow the “leave nothing behind but footprints” philosophy. For fun, she enjoys shooting, kayaking, tinkering on her car and motorcycle, and just about anything else that involves water, going fast, or the outdoors.

Latest comments
  • I disagree with the statement “most of your minerals come from your food.” That may have been so back in the 1900’s. But once farmers began to produce commercially-sized harvests, they planted the same crop on the same patch of earth year after year after year, and any trace minerals (which are the ones we need every day!) were depleted. When the farmers had smaller areas under cultivation, they rotated both the crops and where to put the herds of animals on the earth, so the animal manure and their feet helped to rejuvinate the soil’s mineral contents, as well as the different crops would deplete different trace minerals. So, it is evident that one would need to add back the trace minerals into the filtered/distilled water, no matter what!

    • I’m sorry Pat, but your position reaks of the same science that told us that oil has a finite quantity, that is; the Earth is not producing more oil. We of course know better, however with the zillions of tons of soil and the natural development of that said soil wouldn’t our wonderful Lord in heaven provide His creation the ability to regenerate the minerals through the microorganisms and biological processes going on without the human race even being aware. Granted we as good stewarts should support the natural process taking place, by testing and monitoring our soil, my experience with farmer’s in general has shown more often than not, that they are truly the salt of the Earth and have the planets best interest at heart. I’m not sure why some believe that the old ways are the best, I agree that technology can be a double edged sword, thats why we must choose to use it wisely and think about our children before we just do it. I’m more concerned about genetically modified food than I am about farmers not supporting the well balanced makeup of soils. Just my 2 cents worth…

      • I agree 100% that individual farmers are truly the “salt of the earth.” Most of them learned the techniques referred to by Pat above, but once those lands started to be consolidated into giant agricultural conglomerates and the animals that were once pastured on the fallow acreage were cooped up in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the old rotation of crops and agricultural “sabbaths” (letting acreage lie fallow every 7th year) went out the window. Food grown by giant agribusiness today—where it’s more important to grow a tomato that is solid and can be picked green and shipped a thousand miles without spoilage, and tastes bland when it’s on your plate—is just not as nutritious as what our farming forebears grew.

        • I agree about the food, it is definitely not what it used to be, and we can’t ignore that cancer is epidemic, and very much related to our food and water sources. I highly filter my water, and my dog seems to be licking dirt all the time, so I’m thinking that maybe she is deficient in something. It just stands to reason if you filter everything out, something should be added back in, it’s just a logical conclusion.

    • You’re right, Pat. When soil has been depleted – and is “replenished” with only the amendments humans are aware of (NPK), plants do not always contain the trace elements that are essential for health. And when the minerals have been removed from salt, humans can experience health problems – physical, mental, emotional. Bi-polar disorder (or manic-depressive disorder?), for instance, is due to a lithium deficiency, which few or none would have if our salt was “full-spectrum” and/or our food was grown in mineral-rich soil, for natural salt contains lithium… and all the minerals in the same proportions as seawater, chlorophyll and healthy intercellular fluids. Heaven only knows what other health problems can come of mineral deficiencies… but the internet is also a source of information that might benefit anyone who suffers from a grievous ailment.

      Problem is, it is cheaper to mine seawater for precious minerals (including gold, silver – and lithium) than to mine the earth. At the end of the process – after all the precious minerals are sold to pharmaceutical companies who then sell it to us in the form of prescription medicines – sodium chloride remains. Sodium chloride is the dregs of the seawater mining venture. Very clever marketing tactic to sell “table salt”, ice-melting salt, salt for dying cloth and tanning hides to the public and industries. Problem with selling it to humans as “food”, is that sodium chloride does not sustain optimal health – even with a token bit of iodine put back in.

    • But compared to Water, food would have more of any given mineral.

      16 ozs of a plate of Food is obviously going to provide more minerals to the body than 16 ozs of mineralized water. It just makes common sense.

    • Pat, obviously you know nothing of farming which I do…4th generation farmer. Crops are rotated in the Midwest to stop this process. corn, soybean and winter wheat. in layman’s Terms, corn take4s from the soil, while soybean gives back as it breaks down post harvest. Winter wheat is a neutral crop that doesn’t leach much from the soil…The more you know!

    • Clinically, the chronic illness that used to be found in patients age 40-55 is now occurring in patients age 30-45. Give it another generation and maybe children will not make it to adulthood without having chronic illness. I’m not saying this is exclusively due to mineral deficiencies in our diet. It could be that toxins and chemicals are blocking the the body from absorbing minerals. Most of my patients are mineral deficient, which causes all sorts of downstream issues in the body. And, most of my patients also have issues with chemicals, toxic metals, food allergies, and pathogens that are all making the body overloaded and unhealthy. We are living in an industrial ‘stew’ where doctors are playing catch-up to identify the toxins and their sources, and also figure out how to detox patients safely. Lack of minerals and mineral absorption are a couple areas to investigate.

  • I disagree with the statement that commercial farmers deplete trace minerals in their soil by overuse of a single particular crop. That was true waaaay back when the science wasn’t known. I’m from a family of commercial farmers and my current GF is too. Every year, their thousands of acres are turned, tilled, and planted with a new crop and it is ALWAYS different from the last crop in that field. They rotate corn, soybeans, cotton, and peanuts and turn under the remnants of the last crop. Once a field has been rotated through those crops twice – on average – the field is once again sowed over with grass and cows are released to range on it. This method assures that the crop yields are well supplied with the trace minerals we need.

    • Imagine if you worked a man every day of his life in hard labor. Would he be healthy? It is the same balance with nature and farming. God is right the land needs a full year of rest from any unnatural agriculture or it will not function properly. Transgression of the law brings death (the antithesis of life) Only the Messiah’s Spirit can help us follow his law as the Flesh nature hates it (Galatians 5:17) Leviticus 25:4 But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the LORD. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards.

      • I totally agree, the land needs to rest, the Creator should know, He created it, and it just plain makes sense.

    • Allan, you might want to also explore the information available about tilling the soil. A good read is Fukuoko’s book, “One Straw Revolution”. He was a microbiologist. His information might also save you some work.

    • Allan, even as a backyard gardener I know to rotate my crops 🙂 i think there is just such mistrust now adays that some people take for granted that there are those people that do know what they’re doing.

  • A problem with both reverse osmosis water and distilled water is that the PH is more acidic than alkalyne. Acidic water is not the best water to drink. I will try some of these methods to see if that changes the PH.

    • Deionized Water Is the Best Water. Since the Water is Pure it is a much greater solvent of Minerals than Mineralized Water. This allows Water to pull toxic waste, ions such as used mineral salts, out of your bones and tissues. When the Water is made alkaline, it kills cancer and a host of other diseases. Minerals are best served by plants as nature intended as the cutting edge of science suggests. It could be that you should mineralize the water you feed your crops. Just a thought.

  • Hello I read your article abut the mineral water. You claim our bodies need these minerals but the kinds of minerals are not Bio Available for our bodies. We require the Minerals and Nutrients we get from eating Plants. Fruits and Vegetables and grains.
    The plants absorb the minerals from the soil and then they are if the form our bodies need. You suck all day long on a piece of iron and never raise your bodies Iron level. But you can eat Beans.
    Dark green leafy vegetables, such as spinach.
    Dried fruit, such as raisins and apricots. Red meat is also a good source of Iron. So your whole Idea of adding minerals into our water is bunk. Please give us real information with the true science to back it up not some greedy form of profiting from peoples health and misinforming people of the benefits of Pure Distilled Water.

    • That was a little harsh but I do agree. Genesis 1:29!

    • you actually need to remineralize water so that it doesn’t leech the minerals out of your body!!

  • This is precisely why I have a long term supply of simple daily vitamin pills in my emergency supplies. Their self life is 2-3 years and a good brand provides nearly all I would need in nutrition. If my emergency goes beyond 1-2 years, I would hope I could adapt to a healthy diet by then.

  • Thank you for the article. This will help people out a ton and let them get the minerals they need.

    Carter Henderson
    Serebox, Preparedness Made Easy
    Serebox.com

  • I like and agree with your post Pat. I don’t know what dream world your living in Robert, but it’s a proven fact that farmers are not doing it now the way it was done then. They’ve had their funding taken away long ago and just like everyone else it’s come down to quantity not quality. Also there’s not enough land to do it the way the Word says we should. Yes I believe our Heavenly Father gave us everything we need, however, we have also been given the responsibility to ensure that it’s taken care of to keep it the way it was given to us. Yes there are “zillions” of what we need out there, but it’s under the topsoil. Why do you think people have to go out of their way to pay for cultivated topsoil? And organic doesn’t just mean no pesticides or commercial fertilizer. Thanks for bringing that up Pat. I haven’t thought of that for a while.

  • WOW! I’m reading more of these posts and a lot of people are misinformed. Distilled water not only “scrapes” out the toxins but also the good stuff. So if you use the distilled water method to detox, you have to put back the”good stuff”. And I know not ALL farmers do things differently, but most of them are shipping food long distance and have to pick them early so they don’t rot by the time they get to their destination and (before the food has a chance to make those vit and min). I only buy local produce but not every state has that option. When I went to the mountains in Costa Rica where all it is is farmland, one of the things I will never forget is how delicious and full of flavor the food was there. I’m someone who only eats food to fuel the machine, not for enjoyment, so for that to be able to make it that memorable, it had to be good. Our food has NO flavor! Why do you think that is?

    • Monsanto?

      • I know people who now refer to that company as Mt. Satan.

    • I’m a post-depression baby. When I was a toddler up through my teens, we thrived largely because my father came from a truck-farming culture, and we grew our own veggies and some fruits. There is NOTHING in any market (save some farmers’ markets) like the taste of a fully ripened tomato picked fresh from the vine.

      I eat very little corn these days, because so much of it is GMO, and if I can’t be guaranteed what I eat is GMO-free, I don’t eat it. But I remember well that my dad used to plant Golden Bantam corn (still available as heirloom seeds). Here’s how we did it. Mom put a pot on the stove to boil, and Dad and brother went to the garden and picked 8-12 ripe ears. Then I’d join Dad and Bro on the back steps to shuck it, and into the pot it went for about 6 minutes. All told, 20 minutes from stalk to plate. NOTHING in the store or restaurant tastes that good.

      • My paternal grandparents had what was essentially an organic farm up to and for sometime after WWII. That was a long time ago but to this day I can still remember how good their food and meat was! Fresh and pure. We would walk over to a tomato vine with a salt shaker in hand, pull one off, salt it and eat it like an apple. I rarely buy “fresh” tomatoes now because they taste like I suspect paper would taste, totally devoid of flavor. He also had a lake where he’d catch a fish, clean it and my grandmother would immediately fry it. Another thing was watermelon. Today seedless watermelon has little taste as well. True, seeds were annoying to be sure but the taste was worth it. My comment is rather beside the point to minerals in water but your post just reminded me of what we miss in our food: taste!

        • I forgot to mention that I don’t eat GMOs either. They are a tragedy waiting to happen both to our earth and to our body.

  • Oh ya, and how could this site possibly be making a profit on giving this information?!

  • My question is based on the fact that I already have and use 3 stage filter with R/O unit system. Currently It uses a rope pre filter, followed by a carbon filter then goes through an R/O filter.
    There are simple ways to construct an Ionizer using either dual platium plates at 24 or 12 volts, or even multi Platium Plate arrays that will effectively separate 5 gallons of water into two 2.5 gallon bottles 3.0 Acidic and 10.0 Alkaline Water in about 20-60 minutes. , and then add remineralizing salts or pass it through a remineralizing filter to restore the trace minerals and healthy magnesium levels, only now in a pure ionized, alkaline remineralized solution for drinking. The Ionizing step also removes flouride and other chemicals whiich the R/O unit doesnt always filter out.
    In summary: Pre filtering with R/O unit will also help keep the Platium Ionizer plates clean, long lasting and more effective as well as reduce the need to reclean them as much with acidic water between uses.
    Comments anyone? Has anyone tried this?

  • A lot of the info on here doesn’t strike me as having been written by a doctor of chemistry and soil science (pedology) I studied environmental chemistry cycles, chemistry and pedology in my environmental Sc course… we didn’t do a lot of trace elements as that was a later specialisation, but soil science professors would tend to have a million times wiser information that here.

    In the comments, regarding depletion of trace nutrients by one type of farmer or another, it is possible in soils with low trace nute content, i.e. sandy soils where the water is near pH 7.0… in that kind of soil as well, people will be missing magnesium and calcium and all the nutrients, or if they drink rainwater or acid water from some acid forest drain off or something.

    Magnesium defecit affects 40 pc of todays population, its very important for nerve function, nerve tiredness and so-fourth, and even good mineral water and diet might not bring you a maximum of trace elements your body might benefit from.

    I dont believe in buying clay from miles away because we have lots of clay in tourist mountains in 100 miles around where i live, i can go and get 5 different clay types from 5 different mountains and it gives me an adventure mission to do too.

    Im interested if ash is useful for mineralizing, using micro amounts, particularly for potassium presumably…

    Anyways, if you see clay which is recently eroded from a sheer face, may as well get some. beige, grey, orange, all that stuff, you can even get stones that grind into flour types of powder to use them too, just mix in water.

    I was looking for tips and infos on clay remineralizing and what clay contains and types of clay and how to mix it with the water and wether it dissolves completely and digestion and all lloads of infos because i realized that my sand zone water is basically not good for health as it has zero mineral content ph 7.0… some mountans have marvellus water and i advise get clay from zones where the water comes out tasting a bit like milk and slightly cloudy with minerals. top stuff.

  • I use Marine Aquarium sea salt for coral reef, which has more trace elements.

  • Hmmmm……that’s great!!!

  • I had been using my distiller all the time but noticed that I was having really bad cramp in my legs too often at night. I assumed the water was depleting my magnesium levels, so have stopped using. My thought is.. if I re mineralise the distilled water… (that is so effective at dragging out impurities) ,,, isn’t the distilled water going to hold the remineralization (great word) and just let it pass out my body?

  • I was not debating the issue with you. I was asking a legitimate question.

  • Here’s another way to add minerals to your water……go to coral.basicreset.com and order the Ionyte. All you’ll need to do is drop 4 half droppers full to half a gallon of water to distilled or reverse-osmosis water. Very affordable too.

  • All good info, buy my question is if I spend $50 on a mineral cartridge for my R.O. System the only benefits is Mag and Cal. So why spend the money.? Can someone tell me if there is something more in these cartridges than just Mag and Cal? If that is the case I’d rather spend the money on drops and put it in my glass or in a pitcher.

  • Monsanto rOUNDUP READY GMO CROPS ALL USE GLYPHOSATE – A CHEMICAL INITIALLY DEVELOPED TO CLEAR OUT MINERAL DEPOSITS FROM BOILERS AND PIPES. IT ROBS THE FOOD CROPS OF MINERALS AND AS YOU CONSUME IT YOUR FRIENDLY BACTERIA AND YOU ALSO ARE ROBBED OF VITAL MINERALS

  • HOW TO Mineralization of distilled water using a clay-biochar-ash composite

  • After years of buying spring water, I bought a reverse osmosis system about four months ago. It’s a 4 stage system without a remineralizer. So, after researching the benefits, I decided to add Himalayan salt. I did so for the first two months and all seemed great.

    Shortly thereafter, I stopped with the salt. No real reason other than it was a combination of laziness and some “voice” in my head telling me I didn’t need it. The taste was just as great to me without it, so I didn’t bother with it. I did this for about 2 weeks without issue before also starting an intense workout regimen. It had been almost a year since I’d worked out.

    About a day or two after my first workout something started happening with me that I don’t ever recall experiencing: I was waking up with extremely dry, painful and starchy eyes. My eyes were fine during the day, but not upon waking. Some mornings they felt like they were glued shut and it would take several minutes before they felt like normal again. This persisted to be a daily thing for a couple weeks and it both scared and concerned me very much. I racked my brain trying to figure out what could cause this. My diet had changed. My living and sleeping conditions hadn’t changed. I ended up even cleaning all my air vents and filters thinking some dust or debris may be getting into my eyes at night. That made no difference. I purchased dry eye drops and used them right before going to bed and they made no difference either. For 2 weeks this went on and I sought for answers daily.

    I eventually came upon a website that basically associated dry eyes with severe depletion of electrolytes, which our tear ducts rely upon heavily for proper function. One of the star elements in that process is potassium, and depletion of potassium is apparently often the result of deficiency in other essential minerals and is not necessarily solved by adding more potassium, but balancing out the others so they don’t affect the potassium levels apparently. That’s when I had my aha moment, remembering that this problem started after I’d stopped salting my water and started working out. It never even dawned on me that could be the issue.

    So, I immediately added salt to the very glass of water I was drinking at the moment and also purchased some electrolyte powder, both of which I added to all of my drinking water that day. I woke up the next day with dry eyes, but nowhere as bad as the prior 2 weeks. The day after that, it was even better, and by the third day I woke up with nice moist eyes! This is was a first in about 2 weeks! I continued to monitor this for the next several weeks and I would say I experienced a mild dry eye morning about 5 total days over the course of about 3 weeks. I am now in my 4th week, still working out intensely (cardio and weights), salting my water daily and all seems to be fine.

    So, in my case, my severe dry eye problem seems to have started about 2 weeks after drinking demineralized water and starting an exercise regimen. Once I started adding minerals back into the water, the dry eye problem
    almost immediately ceased, but reoccurred sparsely and with far less severity (perhaps after my more intense workout days). I’m still monitoring the situation, but I am a believer that demineralized water does something adverse (“leaching” or whatever you want to call it) to the complex biochemical and electrolyte balance in our body, which in turn adversely affects the functions of key organs, some of which may be apparent to us, and some of which may not be.

  • Most of the searches I have done agree that a pinch of Celtic or Himalayan salt per 8oz of distilled water will effectively re-mineralize the water. Is there a more specific quantity than a “pinch”? For example, people have different ideas of what a pinch looks like to them as well as different sizes of fingers… For 8oz of water, that’s a good enough measurement, however, on a larger scale, a “pinch” is too variable for my needs.

    I would like to have more exact information if possible.

    • I know that a pinch of salt will allow you at least 1 week more to drink up your milk [1/2 gal or gal.] And you can’t taste it. So it seems to me that a pinch of the Himalayan Salt per gal of water would be fine. I usually put a little into the palm of my hand, reach in with the other hand, and utterly pinch the salt crystals between my index finger and my thumb. I’ve been using this method with milk for YEARS Perhaps saying 1/16th of a teaspoon would make more sense to you, but I have never seen and measuring spoon smaller than 1/4.

  • Thanks for the article.

    My only critique would be to remove the bottled water section entirely or take a stance on reducing single use plastics by avoiding them entirely. It better aligns with your author bio.

    Anyway, thanks!

    • Thanks, this helps get an idea of what I’m looking for. I appreciate your time in replying!

  • Hi,
    is it possible to dig a small well or hole, and extract drinkable water from the ground?
    I think the water from deep soil is already mineralized, and ancient civilizations got the water from wells also, not only rivers.
    And AFAIK they purified it from bacteria with silver

    Also, with modern tech, i think it is possible to just use a pump to suck water from a pipe. How deep should the pipe go ?
    Can you find water anywhere you dig a hole?
    Or do you need equipment to detect underground water before digging ?

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