Will drinking boiled water really cause poisoning?

It is widely rumored on the Internet that water from a water room or boiler will cause an increase in harmful substances such as nitrite due to repeated boiling. The toxic nitrite can also cause hypoxia in the body, and in severe cases even death. Can drinking boiled water really cause poisoning?

Gong Hongbin, a national second-level public nutritionist, said that the topic of poisoning from boiled water mainly focuses on nitrite, which tastes slightly salty, is easily soluble in water, and looks and tastes similar to salt. It is widely used in industry and construction, and it is also used as a colorant in meat products, but the amount used is strictly controlled. Due to the high probability of food poisoning caused by nitrite, the country has strict control over the use of nitrite.

How can there be nitrite in tap water? The water people drink comes from natural surface water or groundwater. Because nitrates and nitrites are easily soluble in water, nitrates and nitrites in surface water may slowly seep into groundwater; in addition, nitrates contained in water sources may also be contaminated by microorganisms and converted into nitrites.

Can boiling water really cause poisoning? It is not easy to be poisoned by nitrite in water. The average one-time safe intake of nitrite by the human body is 0.2 mg per kilogram of body weight. The sanitary standards for drinking water stipulate that the nitrite content should not exceed 10 mg/L. If you do not drink more than 10 liters of water at one time, then it is safe. In addition, the claim that boiling water thousands of times causes an increase in "nitrite" content is also just a speculation. Many experiments have concluded that: with the increase in the number of boiling times, the nitrite content in the water does not have a clear upward trend. The nitrite content of the tested thousand-boiled water samples is lower than the nitrite content limit of 10 mg/L stipulated in my country's "Quality Standard for Drinking Water" (GB5749-2006).