We all enjoy a nice crisp glass of water when we're feeling
dehydrated, which makes sense because our bodies need it most of all.
So, enjoying it is an evolved behavior.
However, some people, notably wellness influencers, have determined that good old
H2O is actually not a good thing at all.
Who knew?
And that what you really need is their own concoction that's actually
an entirely different molecule.
Structured water.
We're gonna look at that right now.
On Skeptoid.
You are listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com Deconstructing Structured Water
This episode was sponsored by John Sifling, Illuminati Imperator,
and Skeptoid Board Chair.
To sponsor your own episode, come to skeptoid.com/sponsor.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience,
real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions
by knowing what's real and what's not.
Who knew there was a substance 10 times as hydrating as water.
This is one of the many claims made by promoters of structured water and
by their many celebrity endorsers.
Structured water, they say, is a version of water that's
chemically different and better.
The water molecules are arranged differently, which brings a vast
array of benefits to the buyer.
So if you didn't realize that your regular water isn't quite water enough,
well then today's episode is for you.
We've got a rollicking adventure through the worlds of celebrity
endorsements, a version of chemistry that is well creative, to say the
least, and the psychology behind buying water that is better than water.
It doesn't take very long to search the internet and find products for sale based
on the dubious claim of the existence of water that's better than water.
The Natural Action Portable Structured Water Unit, selling for $279 is
like a little filtering funnel.
You pour water through.
Spend a bit more and get the Vitalizer Plus Vortex Water Revitalizer
for $899, which looks like a blender and makes structured water
right there on your countertop.
Or spend a lot more and get the Natural Action Magna Ray, MR 24 whole house
unit for $2,999, which looks a lot like the little inline filter you might have
going to your refrigerator's ice maker.
If you don't wanna make it yourself, quite a few companies such as
Ed Hardy, Defiance, and Mindful sell bottled water they claim has
already been structured for you.
You can even make your own the lazy man's way.
Buy glass bottles from Flaska for $50 to $100 a piece.
Fill them with tap water and they'll use vibrational structuring technology to
energize it in as little as five minutes.
The basic premise behind structured water is one of the hallmark red
flags of pseudoscience, and that's the raising of an alarm, that there is
something wrong with the status quo.
In this case, the status quo is regular water, whether from
the tap or from the bottle.
Regular water is said to be chaotic or dead, and strictly
speaking, those are both true.
Water is certainly not a living organism, so it could be said to be dead, though
non-living might be a better word choice.
It's also chaotic in that it is a liquid and in any liquid the molecules are
loose and jumbled and free flowing.
Liquid has a defined volume, but no defined shape.
It can flow into any shape precisely because its molecules are unstructured.
But structured water, so the claim goes, has its molecules arranged
into a particular ordered pattern.
This is usually described as a hexagon.
And just to be absolutely clear, this is not a real thing.
Water does not and cannot behave this way, and we'll talk more about that.
In some versions of the claim, six regular water molecules are arranged in a hexagon.
The six big oxygen atoms are the points of the hexagon, and each has its two hydrogen
atoms hanging off it in such a way that they don't interfere with each other.
In other versions, they call it H3O2, instead of plain old H2O, asserting that
each of the water molecules has both an extra hydrogen and extra oxygen atom.
Some also call it coherent water, primary water, magnetized water, crystal in
water, hexagonal water, or informed water.
Often they come up with derogatory names for real water, such as
uninformed water or depleted water.
As you can probably guess, the health claims made for drinking this very special
water are endless and almost always too vague to be falsifiable or testable.
It's said to enhance your cellular hydration and energy, to facilitate better
nutrient absorption and detoxification, to provide anti-inflammatory and immune
system benefits, to confer improved digestion, skin health and weight loss,
and my favorite that it "resonates with the energetic vibrations of
your body to amplify your life force"
Claims of hexagonal water structure are are not new.
16 years ago, I talked about them here on Skeptoid number 139 when people
selling equally pseudoscientific alkaline water machines claimed
that water came in hexagons also.
But since then, it found a new booster in science and has flourished anew.
In 2013, Dr. Gerald Pollack, a professor of bioengineering at the University of
Washington, published a mass market book called The Fourth Phase of Water, which
discussed his legitimate and significant 2003 finding that water pushes away
objects such as plastic microspheres from the region close to a hydrophilic surface.
He has postulated several speculative mechanisms to explain this.
Including what he discussed in his book, the conjecture that this so-called
exclusion zone water or "EZ" water has the extra atoms in each molecule.
This fanciful claim by a real scientist was all the scam artists
needed to guild their old alkaline water machines and rebrand them as
structured or EZ water machines.
And now celebrities such as Kourtney Kardashian and countless wellness
influencers who lack the science literacy to know any better, promote these
devices as miracle health machines.
There are several ways in which real water molecules can and do form into clusters.
Liquid water has thermal energy that manifests as molecular motion as
these molecules move and collide.
Hydrogen bonds are constantly forming and breaking on femtosecond
to picosecond timescales.
Water molecules also arrange into transient tetrahedral networks,
rings, and chain like structures that persist for similarly brief periods.
Under unusual conditions, water molecules can exhibit different behaviors such
as when confined to nanoscale spaces or in the presence of hydrophilic
surfaces as Pollock discovered with exclusion zones, researchers have
used lasers and other methods to temporarily alter water's structure.
But it invariably recovers within Picoseconds due to rapid thermal motion.
In short, while water molecules are constantly forming dynamic
associations and structures, all of these arrangements are extremely
fleeting, lasting at most picoseconds, rather than the permanent structures
claimed by structured water proponents.
But that's only one reason the so-called structured H3O2
water doesn't actually exist.
That molecule is certainly possible and it's real.
It appears in some metal complexes where it connects metal atoms, but in normal
aqueous conditions, it is extremely unstable and would rapidly decompose
into more stable compounds like H2O2 and H2O (hydrogen peroxide and water).
Hydrogen peroxide is extremely toxic.
If you somehow drank something which then decomposed into hydrogen
peroxide, you would be in for a very painful and fast death.
Nobody has yet died from drinking the product of their structured water
machine, at least not that we know of, so we can be pretty sure that H3O2
is not coming out of these devices.
But let us take the responsible path and not dismiss structured water
machines based on their claims alone, but rather upon the test results.
So let's go to PubMed and search for trials of having people drink
structured water to treat some health condition, or even for
general wellness and see the effects.
Hmm, I only found one.
And it's for animals.
Structured water effects on animals.
Published in the Journal of Animal Science in 2021.
It's a review of 20 years of studies that exposed water to magnetic fields and then
had laboratory and farm animals drink it.
From the paper's conclusion (perhaps the vaguest I've ever seen):
"A magnetic field strength of 1000 to 3000 G is required to generate water
capable of exerting beneficial effects.
While waters treated with field strengths greater than 5,000 G
may result in detrimental effects.
The animal research conducted to date consistently demonstrated beneficial
effects of structured water consumption.
Additional research is needed to demonstrate how these effects occur and if
these types of structured waters are safe to consume and use over the long term."
The paper was written by a Michael I. Lindinger, who does business
as the Nutraceutical Alliance, Inc. In his acknowledgements, he
states that it was "...part of a larger paid research contract... by
Defiance Brands, Inc." Who are they?
Recall back to the top of the show when we listed some
products currently on the market?
Defiance is one of the companies selling bottled structured water.
Big surprise.
But no papers about anyone testing it on humans?
The reason is probably very simple.
None of the claims made are specific enough to be testable, and if
they were, the tests would fail.
As there is no such thing as structured water, you'd be testing
water against water as a treatment for something as vague and meaningless
as enhanced cellular energy.
What person with a scientific reputation they care about is gonna
submit that paper for peer review.
They'd never hear the end of it.
We're nearly at the point where we've run out of things to say about the
claims of structured water, but there are still two points worth covering.
First, let's look at some more of the red flags of pseudoscience
this product throws down.
The appeal to nature fallacy.
If it's natural, it must be safe and healthy and good for you.
A number of these products use terms like "pristine mountain spring water".
The number of wellness benefits found on all these companies' websites collectively
probably rivals the Bible in length, and as we've seen a hundred times before here
on Skeptoid, products claiming to treat everything, probably really treat nothing.
The use of personal testimonials, including influencer and
celebrity testimonials instead of presenting evidence.
There is no theory supporting a mechanism for structured water to
be beneficial to the body in as much as nothing meeting any consistent
definition of structured water exists.
Pollack's book was a published mass market book, not a scientific journal article.
This means it had no obligation for peer review or to factual accuracy.
It simply had to be popular.
Lots of crazy sciencey sounding jargon.
Meaningless to the scientist, but impressive to the lay person who
also happens to be the customer.
These products nearly all have paid social media influencers
and affiliate marketing programs.
You know, like real sciences don't.
But we could go on like this all day.
Let's move on to our second final point, which is the psychology behind a person
who wants to buy a product like this.
Understand that psychology and learning what levers to pull are
critical components to successfully marketing and selling pseudoscientific
products like structured water.
The value of community.
People love to belong to a community of like-minded people.
Marketers love community echo chambers where everyone thinks the same way
and believes whatever their peers say.
Distrust of conventional medicine and science are always gonna be popular,
and people love the feeling of having special insight into the suppressed truth.
Embrace of products like this that contradict established science
is psychologically fulfilling and confers a nice little dopamine hit.
Confirmation bias thrives in wellness communities as it
does in nearly every community.
The feeling of buying a premium product such as paying nearly $3,000
for a water filter indistinguishable from a $10 one on Amazon confers
a sense of power and superiority.
Even without the power and superiority many people genuinely
accept that something more expensive must necessarily be better.
Making any lifestyle change induces the placebo effect.
I've done something.
I've added this device to my drinking water therefore, I expect to feel better.
Confusion of correlation with causation will be a feature of wellness
products until time immemorial.
Anytime these customers feel energetic or happy, they're likely
to credit the structured water.
And regression to the mean is what happens when any injury
or illness heals naturally.
And yet our fallible human brains prefer to give credit to
some recent lifestyle change.
In fairness, nearly any intelligent adult human is susceptible to most or all of
these frailties, and when we consider that the average adult knows or cares nothing
at all about molecular chemistry and knows nothing about the reasons to research
sources or even understands the need to do so, we can hardly blame the victims.
Blame for scam Pseudoscientific products should always lie upon those
selling them because they are the people who have an ethical (if not a
legal) responsibility to ensure the validity and efficacy of their products.
Anyway, that's your skeptical analysis for today.
Stay curious, stay hydrated, and always be skeptical.
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