
Meet “raw” water – ludicrously priced unfiltered water with random bacteria - pjl
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/fear-tap-water-is-a-toxic-plot-to-control-your-mind-heres-the-water-for-you/
======
overcast
This is the dude that started that Juicero nonsense. Now he's circumventing
all of the progress we've made in the last few hundred years with making water
potable. This should end well.

~~~
rhizome
Someone take away this guy's license to conduct business, please. Snake oil is
played out.

~~~
jcoffland
Unlikely, when after decades, homoeopathic "remedies" are still regularly sold
at Whole Foods [1]. The FDA seems to take the stance that if it's not
obviously toxic, conmen can sell anything they can get enough people to
believe in.

[1] If you don't already know why homeopathic remedies are complete BS, look
up "homeopathic dilution" and the meaning of the markings such as "30X" or
"10C" found on these products.

~~~
gumby
> The FDA seems to take the stance that if it's not obviously toxic, conmen
> can sell anything they can get enough people to believe in.

The agency does not wish to take this position but was required to by an act
of congress sponsored by that notable scientist and physician Orrin Hatch. You
ask what his medical qualifications are? Campaign $$$ of course
([http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/us/politics/21hatch.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/us/politics/21hatch.html)
)

Despite this the agency has still managed to come down hard on unsubstantiated
medical claims by some homeopathic rip off artists. But basically $25 Bn can
fund a lot of laws to hurt the public.

------
pwthornton
Some of us grew up on well water. It's generally fine, although you need to
inspect and treat it regularly, and if one of your neighbors really messes up
his well, it can affect the whole water table around him too. My digestive
track always gets a little messed up when I visit my parents back home
(although this could also be from the water being treated for hardness).

If you were really interested in non-municipal water, the best route to go
would be some sort of filtered reverse osmosis setup or something similar, of
which you most certainly do not need a Silicon Valley snake oil salesman for.
You can also get a home system to make distilled water just for drinking that
won't cost that much.

Honestly, the biggest issue that the average person could have with municipal
water is it being overly hard. I might get a filtration system in our new
place to deal with that. I might also be tempted to get some kind of
filtration system for water just for my coffee and tea, simply for taste
reasons.

~~~
schiffern
>Some of us grew up on well water. It's generally fine, although you need to
inspect and treat it regularly

You need to _inspect_ it (the CDC recommends annually sending away for a water
test[1]), but I'm aware of no EPA or CDC recommendation that calls for
unconditionally _treating_ the water. You treat well water only if the tests
find a problem.

[1]
[http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/testi...](http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/testing.html)

[https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/trea...](https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/treatment.html)

~~~
pwthornton
This is true. It's just that you usually find some issues every few years that
you at least need to throw some chlorine in the well.

~~~
jimmaswell
We never did anything to the water wells at places we lived in for 10+ years.
Were we just lucky?

------
olivermarks
If you are interested in 'raw' water live somewhere on a well rather than on
mains water and do your own filtration...buying water in containers isn't cost
effective, unless you are Nestle selling it...

[http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2017/12/21/c...](http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2017/12/21/california-
regulators-tell-bottled-water-maker-nestle-halt-unauthorized-water-diversions-
national-fo/928071001/)

------
iaw
From the makers of Juicero comes Cholera water!

This aligns pretty well with the ideas of the anti-vaccine movement though.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>This aligns pretty well with the ideas of the anti-vaccine movement though.
//

Can you expand on that at all, what particular ideas do they have that this
aligns with. Seems a long way from "vaccines contain stuff that is deleterious
to health" [which is sometimes true, though key is that provably carriers in
infant vaccines weren't causing Autism] to "we should drink water with unknown
pathogens in".

Surely the refusal to put unknown pathogens in your body would align better
with the refusal to put unknown vaccine constituents in to your/your child's
body?

~~~
iaw
In the article they talk about how this water appeals to those who are worried
about prescription drug residues and fluoride in their drinking water.

It seems like the anti-vacc movement makes poor health decisions based on a
flawed or limited understanding of science and a strong faith in pseudo-
science.

Science says vaccines are good, pseudo-science says that scientists are wrong
and vaccines cause autism. Science says fluoridated water is okay, the jury is
on on prescription residue, and we have a pretty clear idea of what happens
with contaminated water consumption, pseudo-science "look what sort of nasty
things science put in your water! Lets go with natural water from dirty
sources!"

Edit: It's not about keeping unknown things out of their body, it's about a
small group of non-scientists making unfounded allegations that can undermine
the efforts society has made to improve the health of humanity (small pox,
cholera, etc.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Science says fluoridated water is okay //

Hmm, Wikipedia tells me the studies have been low quality as to whether it's
harmful in any way. EC don't recommend using fluoridation of drinking water as
they see no benefit when topical application is available ...

With such an important aspect of public health it strikes me as curious in the
extreme that there aren't many high-quality studies?? That alone gets me
concerned that something is being hidden ... is it any surprise that this
would be a widespread concern?

>a small group of non-scientists making unfounded allegations //

The Autism-Vaccination issue was initially scientists raising a concern; in
what appeared to be reasonable research. Until the USAmerican removal of
mercury containing compounds from the vaccine and the subsequent lack of
effect on autism levels I'd say it was still an open question [happy to be
corrected on that, I've only looked back on the issue]. It turned out to be an
[apparent] correlation without a causative link, but we had to wait a couple
of years for that to come back - then there was large scale data.

------
0xfeba
I'm guessing a HN commenter posted this comment on the article's page:

> Let's call it Live Blockchain Water and watch the cash roll in!

I nearly spit my drink out.

------
Karliss
Don't know about about other countries but where I live obtaining and selling
spring and mineral water is nothing unusual. There are laws that regulate it
to ensure it's safe for consumption.(link with english translation on the
right side) [https://likumi.lv/ta/id/278817-noteikumi-par-dabigo-
mineralu...](https://likumi.lv/ta/id/278817-noteikumi-par-dabigo-mineraludeni-
un-avota-udeni)

Pay attention to point 16:

> 16\. Any disinfection treatment by whatever means and the addition of
> bacteriostatic elements or any other treatment likely to change the viable
> colony count of the natural mineral water is prohibited for natural mineral
> water and spring water.

~~~
cesarb
In my country (Brazil) buying bottled mineral water is also common. But I
don't know whether it comes directly from the spring, or is passed through a
filter first. We learn from childhood that one must only drink filtered or
boiled water, so I won't be surprised if there's a filter involved.

~~~
Karliss
Tap water is fine in most cities here but many people just prefer the taste.
Not many buy it for drinking at home but it is very common in water coolers at
offices.

------
abakker
Matt Levine had a pretty funny take on this:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-02/citi-
told...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-02/citi-told-some-
customers-to-buy-the-sells)

But really, can this even be sold? What does the FDA do, exactly?

~~~
pttrpttrwttr
Are there laws against selling untreated well water? I mean, you're allowed to
drink out of your well, shouldn't you be able to sell it if you state its
origins and testing results truthfully?

~~~
abakker
Well, yes, you should be able to if all the tests are done. But, If I report
6/10 tests, then what?

------
davidw
Hey great, now the high and mighty of SV can barf all over one another at
their orgies.

------
Theodores
The thing is that there will be people wanting to defend this product. It will
become just another thing like 'natural salt' that has no added iodine but has
lots of impurities in it. This is then packaged as 'non GMO' and 'Gluten Free'
amongst other organic things.

As a regular user of a bread making machine I do wonder if my bread would be
improved by the use of this posh salt rather than the table salt I normally
use. Would I live longer by not having the anti-caking ingredient added to the
teaspoon of salt I use with my bread?

So, after a push of a button and a couple of minutes exactly measuring flour,
water, salt, sugar, butter and yeast I get perfect fresh bread. Meanwhile, the
mystery individual 'ms Ancedote' goes the whole hog on using overly-good
ingredients to make some 'even better bread'. This will be using wholemeal
organic spelt flour instead of regular strong wholemeal flour, this will also
be measured in 'cups', not weighed. So all the other ingredients are fancy,
e.g. the salt, the oven will need to be on for hours and lots of noises and
mess will be made. Net result is essentially unrisen bread, the science not
understood, the interior still sticky dough, the outer with a thicker and
dryer crust than one might want. To my science mind this is madness, a lot of
work with ingredients coming from all four corners of the globe, just for some
bread that is wrong. All kinds of exciting herbs and what-not could also be
added, such 'rustic' fun is the desired thing, it does not taste like store
bought bread and that is what matters. The fact it takes five hours to make is
part of it. None of it makes sense until you learn the word 'orthorexia':

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa)

So my mystery friend that makes awful bread and does not want to be making
normal bread like I do, why is this? It is just one symptom of a bigger thing
going on, orthorexia.

I would say there is a whole industry going on around orthorexia and that
these guys are tapping into that market.

------
indubitable
This seems pretty funny at a glance, but on the other hand there's a really
really big elephant in the room today - and that is the state of the American
population. Our overall healthfulness has decreased dramatically in just a few
decades. The US life expectancy is even in decline. This all correlates with
things like the rise of the internet, but the rise of the internet has
occurred worldwide whereas the degree of unhealthfulness of the US is
something unique in its degree - and that's in a large population. It's easy
to blame things look unhealthy food, yet I don't think we have 70% of the
population downing Big Macs while treating soda like water in a desert oasis.
In either case gluttony is hardly an American exclusive.

I'm not suggesting that it's the water, but I am suggesting that it is not
unreasonable to think that something we probably believe is perfectly
reasonable or even healthful may be having unforeseen consequences that have
yet to be precisely singled out. And so experiments that sound stupid may not
be such an awful idea. Penicillin was only accepted long after its discovery.
A big part of the reason for that is using a byproduct of blue-green mold to
treat vulnerable bacterial infections is something most people intuitively
dismissed as idiotic - even after the discoverer presented and published his
findings. If there's a market for folks that want to down 'natural' water at a
premium, then I think this is a good thing. They get to act as guinea pigs for
the whole of society, the guy makes a few bucks, and in the end everybody
learns a bit more.

~~~
KaiserPro
I take your point, but, we have a long case history of what happens when we
don't have clean water, starting here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak)
(well it started before that, but this is when epidemiology became a thing.)

safe water doesn't need to be sterile. In the UK, you are allowed a certain
level of "harmless" bacteria. However there are strong laws that are
_enforced_ to make sure that people don't get harmed.

Now, there _might_ be a case that "raw" water provides/boosts/promotes certain
gut flora in people that is beneficial. However gut flora is a new and little
understood science. Applying occam's razor to declining health in the US, and
I'd point to two things:

1) increasingly sedentary lifestyle

2) Terrible health system that denies basic care for >60 million people and
pumps the rest full of narcotics.

Unlike the gut flora theory, there is a mountain of evidence to back it up,
not some bearded weirdo with little connection to the real world.

~~~
indubitable
The problem with things like sedentary lifestyles is similar to the problem
with internet correlations, which in either case imply the same thing. Compare
the US to other nations experiencing similar problems and it's reasonably
clear that whatever our issue is, it's unlikely because of lifestyle changes
alone. Other similarly well developed nations with lackadaisical lifestyles
don't suffer the same problems, yet impoverished nations such as those in the
Pacific isles do. And in many cases, the problems are confined by our
invisible borders. The Czech Republic is a good example there. Bordered by
Poland, Germany, Austria, and Slovakia. Czechia is rapidly approaching problem
levels, its neighbors are not.

There's a great distance between cholera and less filtered water. Worldwide
the high end estimate of cholera deaths is 130,000 and that is with liberal
modeling of unreported deaths. A quick search informs [1] that about 2 billion
people a year rely on water that is absolutely contaminated with feces. That's
a 0.0065% death rate at the high end. Usage of isolated or private water
sources along with basic testing can trivially reduce these risks down to 0.
And on that note of giving context to numbers, we should look at things like
the opioid epidemic. In the US in 2015 about 15,000 people died from all
opioids. Even if we assume that it was 0 before, which it was not, that would
not explain the ongoing decline in life expectancy. The real reason is
mortality rates from a wide array of diseases including 8 of the top 10
killers, heart disease in particular, continue to rapidly grow alongside our
unhealthfulness. And that was after they had been in decline for decades.

[1] -
[https://www.compassion.com/poverty/water.htm](https://www.compassion.com/poverty/water.htm)

------
KaiserPro
I love dysentery.

All it takes is someone/thing defecating in the well and you'll get cholera.

Epidemiology literally came about because of "raw water"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak)

------
justusw
I suppose this is meant as a counter-piece to the article that recently was on
the HN front page:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-
unfilter...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-
unfiltered.html)

~~~
Quanttek
I think the NYT article is already critical of the movement without becoming
snarky likes the Ars article:

> _(There is no scientific evidence that fluoride is a mind-control drug, but
> plenty to show that it aids dental health.)_

> _Talk like Mr. Singh’s disturbs Dr. Donald Hensrud, the director of the
> Healthy Living Program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. What the raw-
> water partisans see as dangers, he says, are important safety measures._

> _“Without water treatment, there’s acute and then chronic risks,” Dr.
> Hensrud said, including E. coli bacteria, viruses, parasites and
> carcinogenic compounds that can be present in untreated water. “There’s
> evidence all over the world of this, and the reason we don’t have those
> conditions is because of our very efficient water treatment.”_

Admittetly it wouldve been nice if more counter-voices would've been heard
even though the purpose of the reader is to acquaint the reader with the
movement (assuming - I guess - a certain reasonableness of the reader)

------
monocasa
FWIW, I absolutely love my in-law's unfiltered well water. It's ridiculously
hard water (tons of calcium etc.), and tastes very sweet as a consequence. I
haven't ever had water that tastes as good, and we always fill up a couple
jugs to take back with us.

If I were somehow lose access to that water I'd probably try this at least
once just to see if it's close.

~~~
jimmaswell
I've had well water with a lot of sulfur in it a few times. Not sure if I'd
say I like it but it's an interesting experience.

~~~
monocasa
Yeah, the sulfur heavy ones are pretty terrible, but that's not all Wells.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
People will buy sulphurous water, "tastes vile enough that it seems like it
could be a medicine" I think is the rationale. Eg at Bath in the UK, not sure
if you can take it away but you can buy a glass in the tea-rooms.

------
maxxxxx
This is ludicrous but these guys still manage to change people's purchasing
behavior. At work I see a lot of people drinking $2 "Honest Tea" which is just
tea with a lot of sugar. On the face of it this is ridiculous but people buy
that stuff. In the age of $2 tea and $4+ coffee I can see a big market for
overpriced water.

------
vanattab
The best water I have ever tasted comes from a spring in the Red River Gorge
area of Kentucky. If anyone is rock climbing in the RRG and wants to give it a
try look for pipe sticking out of a hill side about a half mile before the
Nada tunnel when entering the gorge.

Edit: Just looked up the exact location, 37.815495, -83.692356

------
spapas82
This reminds me of a quote of General Ripper from Dr Strangelove: "Mandrake,
do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies
underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice
cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream."

------
cs702

      > raw_water == snake_oil
    
      True

------
giomasce
This "toilet water" part really reminds me of the movie Idiocracy...

------
sjg007
Are you supposed to boil it?

------
saintPirelli
I guess this is good news for Wendy Northcutt.

------
deno
It’s easy to dismiss the claim that fluoride is a mind control drug, if taken
literally.

When I’ve probed just a little the actual claim I’ve heard is that it somehow
affects personality, making for easier to control masses.

I don’t know whether that’s true but at least that’s a claim that can be
falsified.

The other thing is:

“Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,”

There’s plenty of evidence for _trace_ amount of estrogen and estrogen-like
substances in the water. Maybe that’s not an issue, but it’s also true that
testosterone levels in men are declining worldwide. However there can be a
number of causes for this, and the two are not necessarily linked.

Not mentioned in this article, but on HN frontpage earlier, there’s tons of
micro particles of plastic in oceans, and subsequently wild fish.

I don’t know those subjects enough to make any kind of informed observation…
But dismissing all of it as conspiracy theory doesn’t really sound convincing
anymore.

~~~
KaiserPro
fluoride isn't a mind control drug. They are too hard and don't work. From
memory Cyclizine which is a motion sickness drug was originally a "truth
serum", so you know, scandal and all that.

Social conditioning works far better, with facebook and twitter its fairly
easy to do at scale (see bubble bias)

Tap water (in the uk at least) must be filtered _and_ sterilized, which should
remove microplastics.

However, some places just take river water, a rough filter and a massive UV
light. (I've been to many a camp site that has this, heavy rains make the
water taste different.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Social conditioning works far better //

 _Por que no los dos_?

