The interesting thing about “wellness waters” – bottles of mineral water with improbable things added that makers say keep you well – is not that they make wild claims, it’s how difficult these are to definitively disprove. You’d think science would be all over this: “No, nitwit, there is no such thing as hydrogen water.” In fact, the approach is often a mild, “we do not know, for certain, that this wouldn’t work”, with a hint of tacit eye-rolling in the footnotes.
Wellness waters, in their most modern iteration, claim to be infused with, say, hydrogen or able to maintain blood pH levels (which a healthy body is quite capable of doing) with extra alkaline. It would be unfair to start there, however. There is a long tradition of ridiculous claims attached to the word “water” or – insert woo-woo time-traveling music – “aqua”. It started with Aqua Libra sparkling water in the 1980s. “We pioneered the first generation of wellness drinks back in the 80s, with fans that included Lady Diana and Darcey Bussell,” reads its website. The health secret then, folks, was pretty simple: it was a fizzy drink that did not contain alcohol. There followed Purdey’s (fizzy, no alcohol, with extra vitamins, which were pretty novel then). This is not to be confused with Coca-Cola’s Vitamin Water, which the Advertising Standards Authority ruled in 2011 contained so much sugar that an advert claiming it was “nutritious” was banned.
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