True facts about dihydrogen monoxide
The chemical nobody warns you about
No health advice blog is complete without a discussion on chemicals in your food, toxins you should beware of, and detox mechanisms. Yet, far too little attention is paid to the most deadly chemical in our food, dihydrogen monoxide. A website dedicated to spreading awareness of its harms lays it out plainly:
Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to by some as Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydrogen Hydroxide, Hydronium Hydroxide, or simply Hydric acid. Its basis is the highly reactive hydroxyl radical, a species shown to mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters. The atomic components of DHMO are found in a number of caustic, explosive and poisonous compounds such as Sulfuric Acid, Nitroglycerine and Ethyl Alcohol.
Should you be concerned?
Yes, you should be concerned about DHMO! Although the U.S. Government and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do not classify Dihydrogen Monoxide as a toxic or carcinogenic substance (as it does with better known chemicals such as hydrochloric acid and benzene), DHMO is a constituent of many known toxic substances, diseases and disease-causing agents, environmental hazards and can even be lethal to humans in quantities as small as a thimbleful.
All this may sound unnecessarily alarmist, but it is in fact completely true. It is also a testament to how poorly we understand our world because—if you aren’t smirking already—dihydrogen monoxide is better known by its common name, water.
Yup, regular plain water is a chemical, an acid, and a toxin. If you drink too much pure water—available commercially as distilled water—you may die. Believe it or not, distilled water was a health food fad in the 1970s. The RO water filter in your kitchen attempts to produce distilled water, but because this can be both bad for your health and bad tasting, it adds back some of the impurities via the TDS controller.
Hoaxes and tall claims
The website we quoted from above is related to a hoax campaign from the 90s demonstrating the extent of scientific illiteracy in society. Unfortunately, the current decade isn’t much better. Food companies routinely exaggerate the benefits of their products, sometimes using the scare terms of “chemicals,” “toxins,” and “detox,” other times using positive terms like “aids,” “improves,” and “strengthens,” all the while conveniently failing to mention that plain water does all this too.
Other times, the exaggerations are subtle enough to pass scrutiny. The recurring insistence on added sugar being worse than natural sugar, or jaggery being better than refined sugar is one example. Sugar is sugar, no matter how you obtained it. Adding impurities to sugar does not remove the sugar. The idea of whole grains being better than refined grains is another—adding fibre does not remove the starch. Fibre merely interferes with the digestion of starch, but the same benefit can be obtained by not consuming the starch. Marketing statements fool us into overconsumption of supposedly healthy foods—while failing to educate that most foods aren’t inherently healthy or unhealthy, it’s going off kilter that makes them so.
The emerging fad around low carb diets is another example. While based on an inherently sound premise, of regulating insulin in your blood by regulating consumption of carbohydrates, the hype around brand names like Atkins, Paleo and Keto threatens to harm more people than it helps by sending them off kilter without guidance. If you’d like to try them, hire a coach, or continue following this blog as we unpack the science and present a framework for self-exploration.
Which brings us back to where we started, the chemical significance of water. What exactly is water?
Polar H₂O
You may remember from high school chemistry that water is a compound of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, H₂O. The three atoms form a covalent bond, sharing electrons between themselves (as opposed to ionic bonds where one atom donates electrons to the other atom). Here’s a primer.
In a covalent bond, one of the atoms can exert a greater pull on shared electrons than the others, leading to a slight electrical polarity. This is the case with water molecules, and one of the better illustrations explaining this can be found in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking (page 793):
A molecule of water is smaller than a light wave. We cannot know what an actual molecule looks like because the very medium of looking—light—does not work at this scale (although an atomic force microscope helps). Illustrations like these are approximations meant to aid our understanding.
This V shape (the hydrogen atoms form an angle at 104.5º), the electrical asymmetry (or polarity), and the resulting weak hydrogen bonds between water molecules are responsible for nearly all the interesting properties of water. (Hurrah for modern microscopes again.)
Hydrogen bonds keep water molecules together, making it a liquid, but aren’t strong enough to make it a solid at room temperature. In liquid water, bonds are constantly being formed and broken. Hydrogen bonds are responsible for the surface tension of water. Molecules at the surface are attracted from below but not above, so there’s a tension to minimise the number of surface molecules, causing the round shape of drops.
Steam at 100C contains more heat than water at 100C because of the energy required to break those hydrogen bonds and free each individual molecule. Without hydrogen bonds, water would have been a gas at -90C.
The hydrogen bonds are also why water is capable of absorbing a lot of heat without showing a significant change in temperature, and is why cooking in water is a different experience from cooking on an open pan—especially with steam cooking (like in a pressure cooker).
In liquid water, hydrogen bonds arrange the molecules in a tetrahedral structure—each molecule is surrounded by up to four other molecules (based on hydrogen atoms being at an angle of 104.5º to each other within the water molecule). In ice, they form a regular hexagonal structure (with an angle between oxygen atoms of nearly 109.5º) that increases the space between molecules by about 9%. This increase is why ice is less dense than water and floats, and why freezing changes the texture of food—the expanding ice ruptures cell walls, mixing up intercellular fluids.
Water is good at dissolving other substances because it forms hydrogen bonds with any substance that has some electrical polarity, which includes carbohydrates (sugar) and proteins. Water molecules cluster around these larger molecules, causing the molecules to separate and “dissolve” into the water. In ionic bonds such as salts, the atoms are pulled apart completely, creating free-floating ions.
Hydrophobic substances—such as oils—have non-polar molecules that don’t form hydrogen bonds with water molecules. This is why oil and water don’t mix, why water runs off an oily surface without wetting it, and why oils are fundamentally essential to life: they form cell walls separating the watery content inside from that outside.
Milk is an emulsion of fat and water. While fats (triglycerides) don’t mix with water, related compounds—diglycerides and monoglycerides—have a polar, water-compatible head. These compounds can attach to a fat globule and help it disperse in water. They are also the primary component of cell walls in the form of a lipid bilayer. Emulsifiers are a major piece of the food puzzle and show up everywhere from milk to cream to eggs.
Sometimes a hydrogen ion (a hydron) will break away from one water molecule and associate with another, creating a negatively charged OH⁻ (hydroxide ion) and a positively charged H₃O⁺. (Hydrogen is one proton plus one electron, but sometimes can also contain one or two neutrons, and hence the term “hydron” rather than “proton”.) This makes water an acid, but in such a small proportion to be virtually undetectable. Hydrons (or protons) in significant quantity are important enough that we have a sense of taste specifically for them—sourness. Substances that release hydrons are called acids, while those that accept them are bases or alkalis. Practically every food we eat is slightly acidic. The pH scale (potential of Hydrogen) is used to measure acidity or basicity.
In chemistry, a salt is the result of neutralisation between an acid and a base, resulting in an equal number of positive and negative ions. Common salt, sodium chloride, is only one of many possible salts. It’s also why salt affects the taste of food, a topic for another part in our series on salt.
Here’s a longer read on the structure of water. We’ll build on these foundations as we get into greater depth on how food works:
Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.
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