Pseudo science nets gullible drinking mugs

By Associate Professor Allan Blackman

This article was orignally published in the Otago Daily Times on Monday 1 March 2004.

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Don't you wish that you were the person who had the bright idea of selling water in plastic bottles?

You can't go anywhere these days without seeing someone swigging from a water bottle, and I suppose that's not a bad thing when you consider the sugar-loaded carbonated alternatives.

Water is indeed a remarkable chemical, one that has exactly the correct properties to support life on earth, and without it we wouldn't be here today.

Water has a number of very unusual properties; for example, it gets more dense when you warm it from zero to about 4 °C, it expands when it freezes (which is why water pipes burst in winter) and it has a very high boiling point when compared to similar compounds. These unusual properties are related to the chemical structure of water (a bent molecule with an oxygen atom between two hydrogen atoms) and can be explained using fundamental scientific principles.

However, there are a truly frightening number of websites on the internet claiming that water can be imbued with seemingly magical properties by being "energised", "vitalised", "alkalised", "oxygenised" or indeed any one of a myriad of similarly meaningless terms ending in "ised", and that drinking water that has been so treated will confer any number of vague but impressive sounding (and most importantly, non-measurable) health benefits such as "boosting your energy levels", "better hydration", "free radical neutralisation" "improving mental clarity" and the like.

One such website recently brought to my attention, www.ewater.com, prompted this month's column.

Libel laws probably prevent me from saying exactly what I think about this website and the people that run it, but I'm sure you can figure out my feelings. This website offers a variety of products ranging from "The Essential Energy eMug (complete with flexoelectric E Technology!) to "The eCrystal Environmental Chaos Eliminator". However, this firm's speciality appears to be water. While they do offer legitimate products such as water filters, they also sell a device looking suspiciously like an ordinary blender, that claims to "draw out the natural living nature" of water using a bunch of impressive sounding techniques that are nothing but meaningless jargon. They also offer "magnetic" water direct from a mountain range in Japan that was struck by a meteorite long ago, which apparently is "microclustered".

Still other websites offer "oxygenated" water for sale, claiming that their water contains up to ten times the amount of oxygen in normal water, and that this confers all sorts of health benefits. A quick calculation will show that, at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, water contains about 8 milligrams of oxygen per litre, so drinking one litre of "oxygenated" water will give you a maximum of 80 milligrams of oxygen (never mind the fact that you can only get a maximum of 40 milligrams of oxygen to dissolve in a litre of water at atmospheric pressure). You get the same amount of oxygen from less than one breath of air, without having to drink a litre of overpriced water into the bargain.

The internet is, unfortunately, full of websites like these. The real tragedy is not that these websites exist, but that there are people who believe the claims made and who are willing to part with their hard-earned money to purchase bogus elixirs, potions and pills. Some might think that the operators of these websites are harmless folk making a quick buck out of people's ignorance. I see them as insidious merchants of untruths preying on people's understandable concerns about their health, attempting to cloak themselves in scientific respectability by using errant pseudoscientific nonsense. Strong words perhaps, but justified I think (and not half as strong as those I'd like to use!). Thankfully there are websites on the internet dedicated to debunking this rubbish — an uphill battle I'd say, but one that must be fought. One particularly good site on the subject of water can be found at www.chem1.com/CQ/ — this, in contrast to the site mentioned above, is written by a real scientist, not a pseudo one.