Selling Bottled Water: The Modern Medicine Show
Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t
have for something they don’t need.
—Will Rogers
It may be necessary to fool people for their own good…. Average
intelligence is surprisingly low. It is so much more effectively guided by
its subconscious impulses and instincts than by its reason.
—John Benson, President of the American Association
of Advertising Agencies1
I CONSIDER MYSELF a pretty savvy consumer. My wife and I tried to teach our children from a young age how to question advertisements and to understand how ads manipulate our emotions and play on our dreams. But despite my inherent skepticism, I can’t begin to count the number of thirty-second advertisements, for things I don’t own and would never buy, that still manage to bring tears to my eyes. A good advertiser can sell us something we don’t want or need. A truly great advertiser can convince us to pay a thousand times more than we’re already paying for something we already have. Like water.
The art of advertising is really the art of manipulating images and beliefs with the tools of illusion, desire, ambiguity, and innuendo for the purpose of selling something. This isn’t necessarily either good or bad: People with limited time to shop and short attention spans are often faced with a vast array of competing and indistinguishable products. And when the product is bottled water, all the special tricks of advertisers are needed. Indeed, bottled water advertisers don’t try to sell water: They sell youth, health, beauty, romance, status, image, and, of course, the old standbys, sex and fear. Typical slogans from some bottled water campaigns tell the tale:
Can’t live without it. (Dasani)
Far from pollution. Far from acid rain. Far from industrial
waste. (Fiji Artesian Water)
Sip smarter. Live Longer. (Poland Spring)
Your natural source of youth. (Evian)
My slimness partner. (Contrex)
Trust in every drop. (Kinley)
Cleansed inside, beautiful outside. (Rocchetta)
The oldest way to stay young. (Infinity Water)
Pleasure within you. (Agua Castello)
The history of marketing water with extravagant and questionable claims goes back centuries. As early as 1630 a Massachusetts merchant was fined for claiming his special water would cure scurvy.2 When disease was widespread, medicine rudimentary, and doctors rare, quackery and medical mysticism abounded as people desperately searched for cures to their ailments.
By the late 1800s newspapers, magazines, and mail-order catalogues in Europe and the United States were packed with advertisements for remedies that were often therapeutically useless and sometimes outright dangerous, containing alcohol, opium, cocaine, and even—literally—snake oil. Ironically, some snake oils actually have therapeutic effects, but over time the moniker “snake oil” has come to describes products with both exaggerated marketing and questionable benefits.3 In rural regions of the United States, traveling medicine shows first captured people’s attention with entertaining magic, juggling and circus acts, comedians, music, and storytelling, and then captured their money with salesmen and con artists pitching magic waters, patent medicines, mysterious nostrums, and miracle cures. “Cure All Diseases” claimed the bottles of water, sulfuric acid, and red wine peddled by the famous fraud, William Radam. “Restore life in the event of sudden death,” claimed “Dr.” Sibley’s “Reanimating Solar Tincture.” An English quack, “Dr. Solomon,” offered Cordial Balm of Gilead as a cure for almost everything, especially venereal diseases. His concoction turned out to be water with brandy and herbs.
Due to growing complaints of fraud and false advertising, Congress felt pressure in the early 1870s to authorize the postmaster general to fight con artists who were using the mail to both advertise and deliver ineffective health remedies. Initially, efforts focused on stopping any “scheme or device for obtaining money through the mails by means of false or fraudulent pretences, representations, or promises.”4 By the turn of the century, frauds involving “quack medicines” were so prevalent that the public began to call on the government to strengthen laws to protect the public, and on June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drugs Act—the first national law to offer rules and regulations to counter the proliferation of ineffective, contaminated, or dangerous foods and drugs.5 The law required manufacturers to use honest labels about contents and restricted advertisers from making unsubstantiated health or medical claims. In particular, labels could not contain any “statement, design, or device” that was “false or misleading in any particular.”6 In July 1906 the New York Times editorialized that the law was a vital effort to protect “the purity and honesty of the food and medicines of the people.”7
In his wonderful 1967 history of medical quackery, The Medical Messiahs, James Harvey Young described how conflicting court opinions and loopholes in the 1906 law itself permitted false and misleading labels to continue to flourish. In August 1912 Congress went back and strengthened the law with an amendment that declared a food or drug to be misbranded “if its package or label shall bear or contain any statement, design, or device regarding the curative or therapeutic effect of such an article or any of the ingredients or substances contained therein, which is false and fraudulent.”8
Under President Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Trade Commission statute of 1914 added more protections against fraud and false advertising. By this point, even some advertisers wanted government help to curtail fraudulent claims because of the fear that the public would begin to distrust all advertisements. The Associated Advertising Clubs of America wrote that the “value of advertisements depends largely upon the credence placed in them by the public” and they lobbied in favor of state laws banning especially “pernicious practices.”9 Despite these efforts, wild claims continued to appear in print and radio advertising. By the outbreak of the First World War, even groups like the Proprietary Association, which normally lobbied against restrictions on the food and drug industry, noted: “Advertisements that a short time ago were rejected with disdain are now accepted with alacrity if not cheerfulness.”10
Advertising expanded enormously after the First World War as new industries were created, personal consumption grew, women became major buyers of goods and services, and businesses eagerly sought out new markets. Advertisers knew they didn’t have to sell a product directly—they could sell emotion. In 1927 Mr. John Benson, soon to be president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, wrote: “It may be necessary to fool people for their own good…. Average intelligence is surprisingly low. It is so much more effectively guided by its subconscious impulses and instincts than by its reason.”11
Pro-business governments in place after the First World War continued to rely on self-regulation, voluntary efforts, and cooperative agreements with businesses. During the 1920s the National Vigilance Committee, which ultimately became the National Better Business Bureau (NBBB), worked to promote industry-wide, albeit voluntary, cooperation over advertising practices. The NBBB produced public warnings and bulletins covering a wide range of products, such as diet remedies, radioactive waters, and so-called health foods.
This voluntary approach simply didn’t work. By the mid-1920s even some in the business community began to acknowledge that legal and regulatory remedies and a reliance on voluntary self-control on the part of manufacturers and advertisers were inadequate to the scope of the problem. William E. Humphrey, a pro-business appointee to the Federal Trade Commission, railed against the “lunatic fringe” in the advertising sector.12 Americans, Humphrey said in a blistering 1926 speech to the National Petroleum Association, “are annually robbed of hundreds of millions of dollars through these fake advertisements. All of these prey upon the weak and the unfortunate, the ignorant and the credulous. There is no viler class of criminal known among men.”13
The financial crises of the Great Depression made things worse. Shrinking markets and tighter budgets drove even honest manufacturers to use advertising methods and claims they had previously shunned in order to try to sell their goods. Newspapers and magazines were increasingly unable or unwilling to evaluate advertising claims for fear of losing revenue. “So far as advertising goes, we are fallen on evil days,” said H. A. Batten, an East Coast advertising executive in the July 1932 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.14
Every time the government tried to crack down on fraud and misrepresentation, industry and its allies quickly pushed through new loopholes, mounted legal challenges, or eviscerated enforcement powers. And even when an occasional ruling or enforcement action succeeded, the offending parties often simply slithered away, reopened under a different name (or even the same name), and kept right on doing business. And the prohibition against outright lies has never been much of a barrier to advertisers when enforcement is inconsistent and weak.
The evil days of snake oil salesmen and medicine shows are still with us, and bottled water is often the product being hawked. A vast array of bottled waters are being peddled as miracle cures for all kinds of ailments and modern worries. Fraudulent claims made about the magical benefits of some bottled waters are the same kind of claims made for the magical benefits of patent medicines in the early part of the twentieth century. What do I choose? The bottled water that promises to make me slim? Or the bottled water that promises to complement my desire for a healthy lifestyle? How about the one that offers the hint of sex? Oh yeah! Or the one that offers freedom from fear of disease, contamination, and illness that will result if I drink my tap water? Or perhaps the bottled water whose molecules have been mysteriously rearranged to offer health and emotional salvation? The gullible consumer can find all of these things, with no sign of the regulators who should be protecting us.
A New Alchemy
If you can come up with two or more pseudoscientific, hyphenated words—some of them adjectives and one of them “water”—you too can market bottled water as a miracle cure. Ionized water. Vibra-tionally charged interactive water. Alkalized water. Energy-enhanced water infused with luck or love. Clustered water. Weight-loss “skinny” water. Super-oxygenated water. Magnetized water. Rhythm-structured water. Scalarwave-imprinted, hexagonally-structured water. Positive-energy water. Improved fractal-design water. Water infused with Reiki energy. These are just some of the magical bottled waters pushed on ignorant consumers or people with real health concerns who don’t know where else to turn for help. Pseudoscientific claims for bottled waters can be found in brochures, health stores, and magazines, and especially on the Internet. As use of the Internet has exploded, we are seeing a proliferation of websites that make explicit, unsubstantiated, outlandish, and often blatantly fraudulent claims about the health benefits of bottled waters. And we’re sucking it up by the gallon.
Some of these claims are beginning to draw the attention and ire of consumer advocates and debunkers of pseudoscience. Skeptic P. Z. Myers in his blog “Pharyngula” describes claims about “clustered waters” as “pure unadulterated bullshit” peddled by “greased weasels.”15 Famous stage magician and debunker of pseu-doscientific nonsense James Randi calls unproven bottled water claims “deception” and “thievery,” and he has challenged some bottlers to prove their more outlandish assertions and win a million-dollar prize he has offered to anyone capable of proving a paranormal or pseudoscientific claim under laboratory conditions. So far his million dollars is safe.
But where are the federal regulators whose job it is to protect consumers from these kinds of false claims? Didn’t we win this fight more than a hundred years ago, when America put in place laws to guard our foods and drugs against fraud and to end false, unregulated advertising? Nowhere to be seen. Institutions created a century ago to protect the public, like the Food and Drug Administration and FTC, were never strong to begin with, and one of the legacies of the anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-enforcement movement of the past few decades has been to further weaken consumer protections to the point that misleading, unproven claims are rarely challenged.
The Internet has made it much easier both to make such claims and to spread them widely. In theory, advertising on the Internet is subject to the same laws as advertising in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. In reality, advertising on the Internet is less well monitored and consumer protection laws are less frequently enforced. As a result, consumers are far more vulnerable to misleading information and outright fraud than we would have been just a decade ago, when the channels of information reaching us were more limited and more regulated. When advertisers worked solely through traditional media, monitoring was easier, oversight and enforcement more manageable. Today, new mechanisms for fraud develop far faster and are more nimble than government regulation and oversight. More of us get more of our information, advertising, and products online than ever before, from websites that may be put up for a few dollars and managed from outside of our traditional regulatory and political borders, far from the reach of our legal systems. Even if a scam is successfully challenged in one jurisdiction, it will often pop up somewhere else a short time later.
Who Is Supposed to Be Protecting the Bottled Water Consumer?
The bottled water industry seems to produce more than its share of cons. The regulation of even legitimate bottled water advertising and marketing in the United States has always been hazy and inconsistent, with overlapping or conflicting jurisdictions. General advertising fraud is monitored and regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates food and health products, including bottled water. General Internet crime falls partly under the control of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, especially the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS).
But the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) is a partnership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center. Separately, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Justice have recently focused on online ventures that sell or promote health-care products. Some states run their own programs for addressing advertising or business fraud through state agencies or the Better Business Bureau, which maintains the National Advertising Review Council, a voluntary industry oversight group. Nongovernment organizations also play a role in the United States, such as the National Consumer League, which manages the website Internet Fraud Watch.*
Two basic principles of FTC regulation apply to advertising wherever it appears. An ad or claim must be truthful and not misleading; and before disseminating an ad, advertisers must have adequate substantiation to support objective product claims. The FTC defines substantiation as “competent and reliable scientific” evidence consisting of “tests, studies, or other scientific evidence that has been conducted and evaluated according to standards that experts in the field accept as accurate and reliable. Under the FTC Act, anecdotal reports, articles in popular magazines, opinions, and inadequately controlled open label studies are not considered adequate substantiation and cannot be used as substitutes for scientific support.”** But these federal agencies are failing in their basic missions. Not only are they failing to protect us from contamination, as we’ve seen, they are not even protecting us from obvious charlatans peddling false claims and pseudoscience about bottled water.
* See http://www.fraud.org/internet/intstat.htm.
** See http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/reports/weightloss.pdf, p. 25; see also http://www.ftc.gov/os/2005/04/050411weightlosssurvey04.pdf.
For example, what does all our regulatory brainpower and legal policing authority do when confronted with a website that makes the following claims?
After many years of research and conscious deliberation, Dr. Emoto is able to provide the world with a stable, consumable hexagonal water, imprinted with frequencies to support creativity, balance, and conscious awareness…. There is no question that hexagonally structured water provides more rapid hydration…. Dr. Emoto’s Hexagonal Water is more easily assimilated at the cellular level. It may be one of the best ways to overcome dehydration and protect your body from the symptoms of disease and premature aging. Within minutes, Dr. Emoto’s water moves into the cells, taking nutrients and expelling metabolic wastes more efficiently than bottled water.”16
So what do our regulators do about this? The answer is, nothing. Most bottled water scams should be easy targets for FTC or FDA action. But understaffed federal agencies and an atmosphere of regulatory minimalism leave most of them untouched.
In 2007 I started to track down legal actions taken against fraudulent bottled water claims by the FTC and the FDA. After hours of fruitless Internet searching, phone calls to regulatory agencies, and data requests to the FTC, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request in late 2007. After ten months of back-and-forth, the FTC finally sent me their response: There have been fewer than half a dozen actions against bottled water and almost none against misleading health claims.
All of this would be less of a concern if these kinds of claims were rare. They aren’t. While most of the big corporate bottlers are careful to avoid making misleading assertions, unsubstantiated and even outright false claims are promulgated by literally dozens, if not hundreds, of water bottlers around the world. And these would often be amusing rather than dangerous, except that they take money from people to line the pockets of liars and cheats, and they may prevent people from seeking out legitimate medical treatments for real ailments in the hopes of finding miracle cures from a plastic bottle of magic water.
Here are a few of the classic pseudoscientific distortions regularly offered to the public by bottled water hucksters.
Oxygen Water
Oxygen is good. We breathe it. So what could be better than drinking water specially infused with extra oxygen? The idea that adding oxygen to water offers health benefits has led to a broad set of scams offering oxygenated or “superoxygenated” bottled water at dozens of websites. Other companies offer special oxygen “coolers” that one can buy to add oxygen to your own water. For example, you can buy a special “Millennium Oxygen Cooler” for just $995 or an “Oxygenated Bottled Water Cooler Table Top with cold oxygen water dispenser” for $695 (plus shipping).
Such companies claim a variety of health and performance benefits for their water. Some sellers allege that special oxygenated waters can enhance brain function, increase muscle performance, promote healthier, younger looking skin, accelerate the absorption of vitamins and nutrients, and fight bacteria and viruses. “Perk up the natural way with a glass of oxygenated water from the O2 cooler! Adding oxygen to your bloodstream has been proven to speed up metabolism, strengthen your immune system, increase energy, create younger-looking skin, and even enhance brain function for clearer, more alert thinking,” one website claimed in early 2009, implying of course that their product provided exactly these benefits.17 Another website argues that we should oxygenate our water because “We are simply NOT getting as much oxygen as our human bodies were designed for!…Scientists were stunned to discover that atmospheric oxygen content in ancient times measured twice as high as that of today: It was 38 percent 10,000 years ago, compared to the 21 percent of today, getting lower and lower due to pollution and industrialization.”18
Scientists would indeed be stunned to discover this, since while the composition of the atmosphere has varied dramatically over the eons, atmospheric chemists believe that the level of oxygen in the atmosphere has remained steady for millions of years and is close to what it has been since the emergence of modern homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago. More important, the very small natural variations from place to place make no difference to our health.19
Another website writes: “We are able to increase the oxygen content of our Premium Bottled Water by 700%—the maximum amount of oxygen possible! That’s seven times more oxygen!”20 Actually, a 700 percent increase would be eight times more oxygen, not seven, but my real quibble here is with the company’s scientific and physiological illiteracy, not their innumeracy. First, while it is possible to put extra oxygen into bottled water, it doesn’t stay there long once you open the bottle. Second, even if you were to quickly drink water with extra oxygen there is no proven health benefit, nor alteration in the taste. In properly designed and independent scientific tests, no health or performance difference between plain tap water and water with extra oxygen has ever been shown. On the contrary, studies consistently show no benefit of oxygenated water.21 In a detailed scientific study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2003, the scientists noted while bottlers sometimes claim that their bottled water has 600 or 700 percent more oxygen than tap water, extra oxygen doesn’t stay in solution for long. Of the five brands of oxygenated water tested in the JAMA study, one had no more oxygen than regular tap water, and the other four had only slightly elevated levels—the highest had 80 ml of O2 in a twelve-ounce bottle. A single normal human breath contains 100 ml of O2. The scientists note:
Thus, a single breath of air contains more O2 than a bottle of oxygenated water. Given that hemoglobin is already nearly saturated with O2 during air breathing, and that only a small amount of additional O2 can be dissolved in plasma, it is not surprising that oxygenated water did not improve maximal exercise performance.
No physical or taste benefits were found either. “There were no significant differences in exercise results after participants drank either oxygenated or tap water for any measured variables. Furthermore, the participants were unable to identify oxygenated water by taste.”22
The final scientific coup de grâce to the idea of oxygenated water is that even if you manage to drink water with a bit more oxygen in it, it goes to the stomach, not the lungs. Yet it is the lungs that transmit oxygen to the bloodstream. If you really want more oxygen in your blood, take a deep breath. Or, as Howard Knuttgen, PhD and editor-in-chief of the Georgia Tech Sports Medicine & Performance Newsletter, said in 2001 in a review of the benefits of oxygenated water, all that may result from drinking this stuff is “an expensive burp” and, I might note, a thinner wallet, since you can pay $35 a case or more for this stuff.23 Despite this basic science, you can still buy dozens of versions of oxygenated water today sold by companies that continue to make a wide range of health claims. They even maintain that drinking oxygenated water can promote “clearer thinking,” which could be a good thing for the people who buy it, if only it actually worked.
The closest the FTC or FDA has ever come to challenging these enhanced oxygen claims was an FTC case filed in March 1999 against Rose Creek Health Products Inc. and Staff of Life Inc., marketers of something called Vitamin O (O for oxygen). The company claimed in print and online that Vitamin O drops (drops of their magic liquid that you buy to put in your own water) were a way to enhance the oxygen content of water and that they offered, among other things, health benefits, including the potential to cure or prevent cancer, heart disease, and lung disease. The FTC found that Vitamin O was nothing more than drops of salt water,24 and contrary to claims, does not allow oxygen molecules to be absorbed through the gastrointestinal system, does not prevent or treat any physical ailment or disease, does not have a beneficial effect on human health, has not been proven effective by medical or scientific research, and was not developed, as claimed, by NASA for use of astronauts.25 The FTC received a $375,000 judgment issued against the manufacturers in 2000 and barred the defendants from marketing this or any other product with unsupported claims.26
Unbelievably, Rose Creek (and other) Vitamin O products, “oxygen” water coolers, and other oxygen scams remain available online today making the same blatantly false claims about health benefits that were supposedly prohibited by the FTC a decade ago.27 Websites still thumb their nose at the FTC and advertise “Vitamin O Oxygen Therapy is a liquid taken sublingually or in water to help oxygenate the body, which may benefit asthma, emphysema, fatigue, candidiasis, immune suppressive diseases, brain and memory function, and heart problems.”28
Bottled Water Weight-Loss Scams
Okay, most of us are fatter than we’d like. But eating less and exercising more just seems like, well, too much work. Surely there is an easier way to lose weight. It turns out that there are lots of simple ways to lose weight, marketers tell us. Unfortunately, most of them are expensive frauds. Diet scams are as American as apple pie, with the vanilla ice cream. Why not bottled water diet scams as well?
Excessive weight-loss claims for all sorts of products are common in the United States and some ineffective efforts have been made to crack down on the worst offenders over the years. The FTC rules for diet claims are similar to those for false advertising in general: an ad must be truthful and not misleading; and before disseminating an ad, advertisers must have adequate substantiation that supports all objective claims. Given the prevalence of misleading dietary claims, the FTC has issued a broad ruling that claims of weight loss without extra physical activity or consuming fewer calories are inherently deceptive. As the FTC puts it: “These types of claims are simply inconsistent with existing scientific knowledge.” Unfortunately, enforcement actions against the growing number of such claims in the United States are infrequent.29 Through May 2003 the FTC has filed fewer than 200 cases of deceptive weight-loss advertising since the 1920s and not one involved misleading bottled water claims.30
The lack of enforcement has encouraged the proliferation of a whole panoply of “weight-loss” waters, such as “Skinny Water,” “Jana Skinny Water,” “Coolwater Trim,” “Formas Luso” from Portugal, which states on its website: “comprovado cientificamente, reduzo apetite” (translation? “proven scientifically, it reduces the appetite”31), and eVamor Artesian Water, which wildly claims, among many other benefits, to reduce body fat.32 Someone who drinks a lot of bottled water, or tap water for that matter, may indeed lose weight simply by suppressing appetite and eating less. But this benefit has nothing to do with any special properties conferred by the water itself as claimed by a variety of bottled waters, nor does it justify the exorbitant prices charged for these bottles.
In 2005 a company called Jana Water started marketing Jana Skinny Water, “a no-calorie water, enhanced with a unique combination of ingredients to help people lose and maintain their weight.”33 “Curbs appetite; increases fat burning,” claims the version of the website posted in July 2005 and online through 2006. Those marketing the dietary power of the water argued that it could reduce appetite, increase metabolism, and block carbohydrate absorption if you drink enough of it, right before you eat. It can even “keep you good looking.” To be sure, these weight-loss waters can slim down your bank account. Jana Skinny Water cost around $40 a case. In 2005 Jana Skinny Water won the award for “worst claim” in the Quackery and Fraud categories of the annual Slim Chance Awards for Worst Diet Promotions. These awards are presented annually by the Healthy Weight Network and the National Council Against Health Fraud as part of their effort to counter widespread fraud in the weight-loss industry and “the exploitation by con artists of the public’s seemingly insatiable desire to lose weight.”34
What is the magic? For many “diet” waters, including Jana, the secret ingredient is hydroxycitric acid. What does this stuff do? “Current research on humans does not seem to indicate that hydroxycitric acid, the key component in G. cambogia [a plant found in Southeast Asia], has any effect on obesity,” said Dr. Susan Bowerman, former assistant director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Human Nutrition, and a registered dietician and author.35 A 2004 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that hydroxycitric acid and a wide range of other dietary supplements could not be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to reduce weight.36 They also concluded that “the evidence for most dietary supplements as aids in reducing body weight is not convincing.” A 2005 review of twelve separate blind clinical trials of this stuff showed no consistent effect compared to placebos.37 In the United Kingdom, in 2008, criticism from British regulators forced the producers of Skinny Water to concede that their claims are not supported by clinical studies.38 The British Food Standards Agency warned the company that the product would violate new European Union laws against pseudoscientific claims. But these claims still abound throughout the bottled water industry, and U.S. regulators have yet to take action against weight-loss waters.39
Clustered and Magically Structured Waters
Perhaps the most common and weirdest bottled water claim is that water molecules can be magnetically, or electrically, or otherwise magically rearranged to promote health, energy, or flavor. Dozens of hucksters offer magically restructured waters, using pseudo-scientific language, doctored or misleading photos of ice crystals, and personal testimonials, often based on the bizarre writings of a Dr. Masaru Emoto. Dr. Emoto (his doctorate is apparently in International Relations) claims that music, words, and thoughts combined with magic machines can affect the shape of frozen water crystals.40 His followers point to photographs of “water crystals” that Emoto claims were affected by exposure to different things—beautiful crystals come from being exposed to classical music; ugly deformed crystals result from being exposed to heavy metal music. In fact, his followers say that if you just tape paper with written words on a water bottle, the water inside will restructure with different crystals: beautiful ones from words like “thank you” and “love and appreciation,” and ugly ones from paper with things like “Adolph Hitler” or “you make me sick” written on them.41 By the way, Emoto has also written that humans on Earth are descendants of criminal exiles from outer space—living in sort of an intergalactic Australia.42
Nineteenth-century German physicist Ludwig Friedrich Kämtz once wrote, “Die Elektricität und der Magnetismus sind diejenigen Naturkräfte, mit denen Leute, die nichts von der Elektricität und dem Magnetismus verstehen, Alles erklären können.” (That is, “Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.”43) The claims for Dr. Emoto’s Hexagonal Indigo Water, which sells for more than $30 per 8-ounce bottle, give a flavor for this large group of bottled waters.
Using a combination of scalarwave energy, laser light, inert noble gases and frequency-emitting crystalline ceramic oscillators, Dr. Emoto’s Water is hexagonally structured and imprinted with specific frequencies which are designed to stimulate and encourage mental coherence, symmetry and balance the qualities necessary for optimal functioning in a complex world.44
This kind of description has been called “pure techno-claptrap” by scientific debunker James Randi, yet Emoto’s followers and other “clustered water” proponents are actively selling a wide range of bottled waters, all of which use variations of these claims. For example, Royal Springs, a Texas water bottler, sells water at $50 a case, claiming: “Rhythm Structured H2O™ has smaller water clusters which move more easily in and out of cells in our body and more effectively carry in nutrients and wash out waste. The result is improved hydration, which allows our body to naturally detoxify itself.”45
Or H2Om (get the pun? oooommm), “The World’s first Vibrationally charged, Interactive water,” which “promotes positive thinking and positive energy for people and the planet.”46 The website for H2Om repeats Emoto’s claims that “recent scientific research has proven that water is directly effected [sic] by the words, sounds, and thoughts it is exposed to.”47 Before the water is shipped, the employees “charge the water in the storage facility with sound and music with intent.”48 Or Aquamantra’s claim that their “energy-enhanced” bottled water “infused with luck gives Oscar nominees the edge.”49 As their website says, they also rely on:
the scientific work-studies of Dr. Masaru Emoto, who over the past nine years has proven, through the use of hyper-powerful microscopes, that words written on bottles can affect the water’s molecular structure….
Dr. Masaru Emoto…showed us the basic principles of quantum mechanics theory, whereby the molecular structure of water was changed by a Zen Buddhist monk’s thought. Based on this premise, Aquamantra uses the design on its labels to affect the molecular structure of California natural spring water to make it more refreshing and wholesome to drink.50
I couldn’t make this stuff up. They go on to claim:
Take a piece of scotch tape and write “I Hate You” on the water, leave it overnight, in the morning take a sip of your “hate” water then take a sip of your regular water. Email us your feedback…we’re anxious to learn your findings. That is precisely how we created Aquamantra. The words actually change the molecular structure of the water, and most definitely changes [sic] the flavor of the water to taste deliciously smooth. This flavor is almost indescribable, its [sic] full of energy and its [sic] fantastic.51
The list of magically restructured waters goes on and on: in New Zealand one finds Blue Water selling for £11 a liter, which “has negative memories removed and replaced with beneficial energy patterns.”52 Vibe Water is marketed as a way to “tune” the body with energy patterns that can be imprinted in the water.53 H2X Scalar Wave Activated Water is made with “state of the art Quantum Star Scalar Wave Generators, Tesla Coils, proprietary Orgone Technology, Radionics Equipment, proprietary Hypersonic Frequency Generator Equipment, and Hyperdimensional Sacred Geometry and unique imprinting frequencies.”54 This last stuff is sold as a “concentrate,” just like Dr. Emoto’s Hexagonal Indigo water or Vitamin O—just add a milliliter of it to a liter of tap water or spring water. They sell it for around $30 for 30 ml, which means it costs around $1000 a liter! For just $99 for three bottles, you can get “concentrated” Zunami water “raised to a high level of electromagnetic power through a proprietary process. It is designed to restructure water into hexagonally organized bio-molecular clusters, providing better intracellular water exchange.”55 A New York company called Vava has marketed water treated with “low-level electromagnetic frequencies that change the crystallisation of the water, bringing about a physiological response starting at the cellular level.”56
The Special Case of Penta Water
One of the most persistent examples of the bottled-water scam of “restructured” or specially “clustered” water is Penta Water. My first hint that some bottled water producers were hoping to sell more than water came nearly than a decade ago, long before the current explosion of interest and sales. One of my staff at the Pacific Institute walked into my office with a bottle of something called Penta Water and asked if I had ever heard of it. Her sister, it turned out, drank nothing but Penta Water, at over $60 a case, specially ordered from Southern California. What was special about Penta Water? First produced in the late 1990s by a southern California businessman, William Holloway, Penta also claimed to have “restructured” the water through “molecular redefinition” and a special “oxygenation treatment.” Its producers claim it has been “shown through highly technical scientific testing (Raman spectroscopy) to have 30 percent smaller molecular water clusters,” to have “a higher boiling point and higher viscosity than normal water,” and so on.57
Sales of Penta expanded rapidly with the development of an aggressive online marketing effort. As each new claim of Penta water’s astounding benefits went unchallenged by FTC or FDA regulators, the list quickly grew. By mid-2001 the company was claiming that
Penta…has been reduced to its purest state in nature—smaller clusters of H2O molecules. These smaller clusters move through your body more quickly than other water, penetrating your cell membranes more easily. This means Penta is absorbed into your system faster and more completely. When you drink Penta, you’re drinking the essence of water. You get hydrated faster, more efficiently, and more completely than with any other water on earth.58
By early 2002 Penta’s webpages were asserting that the water had “superior hydration capability” and was “one of the purest drinking waters available.” For support, the producers offered links to obscure and opaque scientific studies about “aquaporins” and water flow in cells.59 By May 2003, the claims started to get even more specific, grandiose, and bizarre:
Penta can help improve athletic performance, reduce acid load inside cells, increase the time cells live in adverse circumstances, and even reduce chromosomal mutation rates! Penta can do all these things because it’s truly different. The individual water molecules in Penta are arranged into small, stable clusters that more effectively get into your cells.60
Penta’s claims eventually provoked a response from scientists and even from scientific skeptic James Randi, though not from U.S. regulators. Randi became famous as a magician and escape artist, and he has devoted much of his life to the James Randi Educational Foundation, committed to identifying, revealing, and debunking pseudo-scientific and paranormal claims. His foundation has famously offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who can “show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” Hundreds of tests of ESP, dowsing, psychic power, astrology, faith healing, and more have been conducted; not a single one has passed.
In 2001 Penta’s allegations provoked Randi to describe them as “a pack of lies designed to swindle and cheat, to steal money, and to rob the consumer,” and he challenged them to apply for his prize money, noting
the sellers of “Penta” know they’re lying, they do it purposefully, and they know they can get away with it because of the incredible inertia of the Federal agencies that should be protecting us against such deception and thievery. Those agencies just can’t do the job, and they bumble about endlessly while the public continues to pay through the nose.61
Randi’s attention was particularly drawn to the assertion of superior hydration and the claim that “test seeds [grown with Penta Water] would germinate in half the time as the control seeds.”62 Unlike so many of the wild claims made by bottled water marketers, here was something that could be directly and easily tested. Randi proposed to Holloway and Penta Water a series of double-blind tests for both the claims of superior hydration and faster-growing seeds.
Initially, Penta and Holloway accepted his invitation. Holloway told Randi that he wanted to use his own instrument, a “Bio Impedance Analyser,” to test how hydrated humans get drinking Penta. Randi agreed, saying that the instrument would simply have to identify correctly which type of water, Penta or non-Penta, was drunk by 37 out of 50 subjects. If it could pass this relatively easy test, Holloway and Penta would then be eligible for the million-dollar prize. At this point, Holloway blinked and withdrew from the experiment, sending off a set of nasty emails that are still online at Randi’s website.63
In late 2004 Penta Water’s statements were more officially challenged in front of British regulators the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of the United Kingdom. Among the assertions that were challenged were statements made on a brochure distributed by mail in England and on their webpage: “Proven faster, better hydration,” “no ordinary water,” “ultra-purified, restructured ‘micro-water,’” “smaller stable clusters,” “improves the environment within your cells,” “unique patented structure,” and “unparalleled purity.” The complainants challenged Penta on the grounds that their advertising misleadingly implied the product had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water and was “restructured.”
Penta Water filed papers that they argued showed evidence of restructuring, and also several works in preparation that they claimed showed increased performance and recovery levels after exercise with Penta when compared with ordinary water. They also argued that, because Penta could (they claimed) hydrate more efficiently than tap water, it was better for health.
After independent review, the ASA concluded in March 2005 that the scientific evidence submitted completely failed to prove that Penta had any health benefits over and above those of ordinary water or had been “restructured” any differently from ordinary water to form stable smaller clusters. The ASA told Penta Water “not to repeat claims that implied the product was chemically unique, had been restructured or molecularly redesigned, or hydrated cells and improved physical performance better than tap water.”64
Despite this ruling, Penta and its offspring such as Aqua-Rx water continue to make a wide range of health claims. As of 2007 the company’s website claimed that Penta Water could dissolve “calcium oxalate monohydrate (the main substance in 85% of kidney stones) three times faster than normal water.” It promoted “an increase in cell survivability by 266%.” It claimed to lower “DNA chromosomal mutation rates” in human cells, and offered references to drinkers looking and feeling “more youthful, energetic, and all around better.”65 In 2008 and 2009 versions of their website claimed improved anti-oxidant activity, aid in weight loss, improved physical performance, faster hydration, increased muscle power and nerve firing, faster dissolving of kidney stones, increased cell survivability, and more, all without independent peer-reviewed scientific publications showing that drinking Penta water actually conveys any such benefits.66 A footnote on the Penta website says “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.”67 Indeed. Why not, one wonders?
All of these various extreme claims use seemingly scientific language to convince an unsuspecting or uninformed public to spend money on things they don’t need, and they prey on our fears that the alternative—in this case tap water—is unsafe. Scientists understand the physical and chemical properties of water. We know how to keep it clean, treat it to remove impurities, and process it for human consumption. But as long as charlatans see a way to capitalize on our ignorance or fear, and as long as our regulatory agencies keep their heads in the sand, snake-oil salesmen will always be with us. It is long past time for regulators to step in to protect the public from twenty-first-century snake-oil salesmen.