Drinking Heavy Water
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as a first-hand account of how heavy water tastes, reportedly slightly sweet with an aftertaste.
What it is
Cody's Lab obtains pure heavy water (D2O) and drinks it as a taste test, reporting its flavor and feel. It is a short self-experiment.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites danbruc · 2017-02 · on “Making plain water taste similar to soda or juice”
It surely has. One could probably argue whether it is smell or taste, or whether it is due to the water itself or the [lack of] minerals and gases dissolved in it, but there is definitely a noticeable variation between different things commonly called water. Even more, there is at least some evidence [1] that there is a noticeable difference between normal and heavy water where heavy water is described as slightly sweet, see for example this, admittedly not very scientific, self-experiment [1] on YouTube, drinking at 4:30 and 7:50. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites tsovlerg · 2021-04 · on “Human taste buds can tell the difference between normal and 'heavy' water”
Cody's Lab - heavy water taste test: [this video] TLDR - sweet, has an aftertaste, feels cold on the lips (compared to regular water)
Cites nayuki · 2024-04 · on “U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS”
> Any water you drink is already very much hypotonic relative to your bodily fluids. True. The saline solution used for blood injections has 9000 ppm of dissolved solids. Whereas tap water above even ~200 ppm tastes disgusting to me. > I drank quite a bit of DI water in grad school Nice... but I wonder if it's considered food-grade, and if there are any non-ionic / non-polar impurities in it. > Also, heavy water (D2O) tastes sweet. I find that plain distilled water tastes sweet too. I can't afford heavy water, but this YouTuber did: [this video] . > it also won’t kill you when consumed Deuterium oxide will kill you only after deuterium replaces a significant portion of all your body's hydrogen at