Cactus plants are some of the most popular plants in circulation in the world these days, as evident from the many people investing in different cactus plants.
Cactus plants bring aesthetic value and nature wherever you place them. However, there are other functional aspects of cactus plants as well.
Cactus plants are now being hailed as a superfood by many popular fitness websites. However, these fitness websites don’t have much science backing their claims.
However, there are nutritional aspects to cactus plants that make people spend money on them and their products.
Many people use different cactus products as nutrition. People tend to isolate parts of the cactus plant, such as the cactus pads and the cactus fruits, as there are many notable benefits.
However, many people don’t necessarily like the same kind of food, and many people find eating cactus fruits and plants difficult. For these people, the extraction of cactus water may hold some appeal.
Cactus water has many nutrients, and many vendors in Mexico extract the water and sell it.
With the growing popularity of cacti plants, cactus water has also seen an uptick in popularity. However, some people don’t want to consume pre-packaged cactus water since they want to avoid processed products with additional preservatives.
Most people who want to drink cactus water do so for their health. It’s healthier to extract cactus water by yourself than buy cactus water that can be confounded with the very substances they’re running away from.
In the article below, we’ll learn about all the ways you can extract water from the cactus for better nutrition.
Table of Contents
Can You Drink Water From Cactus?
If you’re thinking about drinking the water from a cactus, you probably want answers to the question of its safety.
Even though cactus water is a natural extract, it can have adverse effects if you don’t consume it properly.
So, can you drink the water from a cactus? Yes, you can. However, it can have an interesting effect on your gut.
People choose to consume cactus water for different reasons, and you have to decide if drinking cactus water will give you the desired response.
Even when you have decided to drink water from the cactus, you want to ensure that it’s according to your body weight.
Any more or less will not have the desired effect. Less cactus water will still not be as big of a problem as too much cactus water can be. People consume cactus water because it has diuretic properties.
These diuretic properties can make the cactus a viable defense against hangovers. However, cactus water cannot be replaced completely by potable water. If that’s something you want to do, take proper care.
How to Extract Water from Cacti?
Now that we know that cactus water is drinkable, we can work out how you may want to extract water from cactus. Before you think about extracting water from the cactus, you need to know whether you understand the insides of a cactus plant.
Cactus plants are not like coconuts where you can just crack open a cactus plant, and the water will come gushing out. Instead, you need to follow a particular method to know how you’ll extract the water from a cactus plant.
To give you an idea of how to do this, we will first look into what a cactus looks like on the inside. Firstly, you can extract water from a cactus pad in several ways.
You can extract water from the cactus’s fruit or its pads. If you’re thinking about extracting water from the fruits, consider its type. If the cactus is a prickly pear, the preparation method will carefully extract the spines and peel the cactus.
You can then extract the juice from the cactus. You will have to cut up the fruit using a knife to do this. You can put the cactus fruit in muslin and apply pressure to it so that the water will squeeze out. You can collect the juice in a bowl.
For the cactus pads, the procedure is somewhat the same. You have to extract the cactus pad. Once you isolate these pads, remove the spines from the pads.
Removing the spines is a consistent operation. You have to ensure you’re wearing the right type of equipment for this, so you don’t harm yourself.
Once you remove the spines, you should cut your pad from the top and then run your knife along the sides of the pads to open it up.
The cactus is very watery, and the pads’ meat is generally very succulent. It would be best to avoid the central part of the cactus pad because it can be extremely stringy. However, you can access the other parts with relative ease.
To extract cactus water, you have to remove the meat from the cactus pad and place it in muslin. As you do that, you can then apply pressure to the cactus meat until the cactus water starts coming out.
You can wring out the muslin as much as you want so you can extract an ample amount of cactus water for yourself.
Either of these methods of cactus water extraction may work for you.
What Happens When You Eat a Cactus?
It may seem crazy for you to eat certain foods. However, with globalization and cultural exchange made possible by the internet, palettes are evolving and diversifying.
Because of these changing palettes, many people are now eating foods like nopal cactus plants which have been a staple in Mexico.
Cactus plants need a lot of preparation before you can eat them. Additionally, you may also find yourself keeled over because you’ve eaten too much cactus plant.
Too much cactus plant can be alarming as it triggers the gut to have diarrhea or at least have a reaction.
You may not be allergic to the cactus at all and still find that the cactus still upsets your stomach. The reaction might have happened because you consumed the wrong cactus species.
Eating the right cactus species will not cause any negative impact on your health.
Cactus ingestion can feel weird at times, and we will list all the ways it might affect you.
One thing it might do is upset your stomach. Cactus plants are diuretics, and this can affect your digestive system overall.
It may also affect you positively if you eat cactus on a night before massive drinking. It may restrict the dehydration you feel during a hangover.
An effect of ingesting cactus plants could also be that you start to hallucinate. There are psychedelic effects to cactus ingestion.
Is Cactus Juice Poisonous?
Cactus Juice being poisonous implies something inherently wrong with cactus juice. However, this isn’t the case. Cactus juice isn’t toxic.
It’s not going to harm you in all the ways you think it will. Poisonous means that one lick with cactus juice will have you in the ER for some recovery. However, that idea is completely inaccurate.
If you take in a small portion of cactus juice, it might not affect you as much. You might reduce the likelihood of experiencing a headache or needing water. However, for the most part, you’ll be fine.
Poisonous implies your survival will become difficult due to the ingestion of the cactus juice.
Cactus juice has many great properties, and people extract it to benefit from them. Some of the properties of cactus juice are as follows:
1. It Helps With Diabetes
Cactus juice is added to the diets of people with ‘type 1’ and ‘type 2’ diabetics, causing these patients to have lower blood glucose levels. A study was conducted with people to understand the effect of cactus extract, and people found that this response took up less sugar in diabetic patients.
It can reduce the sugar levels in the blood.
2. It Helps With Hangovers
As stated before, it has diuretic properties that help the succulent stand out. By taking some cactus juice before a night of heavy drinking, you can reduce the hangover effect the next morning.
The cactus extract affects the body’s water retention, so you may find that it helps with all kinds of hangovers.
3. Adverse Effects
You also find that there are some aspects you must take care of when dealing with cactus extracts. One adverse effect you might experience uncontrollable vomiting after having some cactus water.
You may also be affected and have diarrhea. If you’re someone not quite sure how diuretics work, you should stay away from cactus plants. The adverse effects are factors you must take care of a great deal.
None of these aspects make cactus water poisonous, as you may think. However, there may be some adverse effects, so you need to be careful.
Is Every Cactus Water Safe to Drink?
No, it isn’t. You can drink from certain species of cactus. However, most cactus species can cause an adverse reaction if you’re not careful with them.
Thus, you need to know which cactus species you can extract water from.
Cactus experts believe you should not be drinking cactus water from any species apart from one as doing so could be harmful to you.
The only cactus plant you may drink the water from is the fishhook barrel cactus.
Even with these cactus plants, you should ingest the water in limited amounts, so you’re not affected too adversely by the entire ordeal.
Plant experts prefer this cactus because it’s the least problematic among all plant species.
You might have seen scenes in some movies where characters find themselves holding on to dear life in an inhospitable desert only to recover by drinking water from a cactus pad.
However, if you find yourself in a similar situation, remember you don’t want to put yourself in more dire situations.
We know now that not all cactus species have water that nourishes and improves health. We also see that most cactus species don’t.
Only one or two cactus species can benefit us, and you should take care in this regard when extracting cactus water on your own.
Which Cactus Water Is Safe to Drink?
Most cactus water types are not safe to drink. One of the most prominent cactus water types you can drink is the fishhook barrel cactus. This cactus water won’t make you want to throw up.
Reasons to Invest:
You may want to get cactus water for different reasons.
Cactus Water Is Easy to Extract and Is More Accessible.
You don’t have to worry about being able to access cactus water. Cactus plants are especially hardy, which means that they will grow up anywhere.
Their hardiness means you don’t have to worry about how often you come across cactus water. You might need cactus water for surviving in a desert situation.
Then cactus are available everywhere, which means you don’t have to travel too far to benefit from the cactus plant.
They Are Beneficial
Cactus plants have many products that make them very diverse. You can use all sorts of cactus products as a substantial variety of these plants are available.
They Are Popular
Since cactus plants are popular, there is a lot of information available regarding these plants. You don’t have to worry about how your body will be affected when you drink the water from any cactus species.
You also don’t have to worry about potentially damaging your health. There is a lot of information available on the internet explaining all the things that can go wrong when you consume a specific cactus plant.
What Are the Benefits of Cactus Water?
There are many benefits to cactus water. Some of these benefits we have mentioned before. To summarize some of them, we are listing the following:
1. It Alternates as a Sports Drinks
Many people who want better health have turned to alternate diluted cactus water as a sports drink. This fact makes sense as cactus water replenishes some electrolytes in human beings.
Cactus water has all the benefits of cactus fruit and has actual iron content and low sugar content. It is beneficial for people who want to remain fit while maintaining a lower blood sugar level.
2. It Regulates Body Fluids
Cactus water may seem as simple as regular water. However, there are a lot of layers and complexities to this simple concoction as well. Cactus water generally has cactus fruit extract.
The cactus fruit extract adds varying levels of potassium into the mix. The potassium and sodium help balance out the fluids in the body.
Thus, you’ll find that even a lick of cactus water can affect your health in a significant way. Body fluids are necessary for maintaining the water balance in the body.
Thus, with the body, some regulation of body fluids is appreciated.
For people who like drinking regularly but don’t like nursing hangovers, cactus water provides a significant help—taking even a bit of cactus water before a night out can help people with their electrolytes and hydration problem.
3. They are Rich in Iron
Cactus plants are also rich in iron, which the human body requires to produce the chemical hemoglobin. Hemoglobin affects how the red blood cells’ oxygen-carrying capacity.
The greater the amount of iron, the more easily you will breathe.
If you work out a lot of exercises and want to increase your physical endurance, adding something rich in iron like cactus water can make your life more efficient.
Iron provides oxygen to the cell more efficiently, so you can exercise in a better way. Iron deficiency can cause a lot of fatigue and disturbed sleep. Thus, you want to avoid that at all costs.
4. Better Gut Health
Cactus plants also have saponins, which break down material more easily. Thus, you’re unlikely to have constipation, and it also helps in urine production.
What Structures Help Keep a Cactus Store Excess Water?
Cactuses’ primary water storage system is the collapsible-water storage cells found in the stem. Some cactus plants also adapt to store water in other cells like their root cells.
The collapsible water-storage cells occur in the form of little holes and orifices. They are particularly helpful as they can store water for a very long time.
Cactus plants also have ribs and flutes that help to store water in the plant. These aspects aren’t always visible, but they help with excess water storage.
What Happens If You Drink Poisonous Cactus Water?
By poisonous cactus water, we mean water from a cactus that isn’t the Fishhook Barrel Cactus. If you drink such cactus water, you will experience the following symptoms: vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea.
Final Thoughts
There are many reasons to extract Cactus water. It’s natural and easy to extract. The cactus water also has many benefits that make the extraction worth the effort.
In conclusion, if you’re in the desert and have no water, remember you have a cactus and you have no water. The cactus is a desert plant and can help you survive.
