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Comment by whathaschanged | Hacker News Reader

Coconut water is repackaged waste byproduct that someone figured out how to make money off of. It's classic marketing.

The sad thing is that all this marketing prevents people from making real improvements. I know people who wanted to switch to better nutrition but then they saw the cost of "superfoods" and organics and gave up. I told them to just eat regular vegetables but it has to be either superfood or nothing. Same with exercise. Either you have to do Crossfit to the point of exhaustion or just stay on your sofa.

> Either you have to do Crossfit to the point of exhaustion or just stay on your sofa

This comes up with some regularity in my circle of friends. They've been sold the idea that the value of exercise is only measured in terms of calories burned per minute of activity. Not only is this negating 90% of the benefits for exercise, it's also a useless measure because it's impossible to out-train a bad diet and excess calories.

I agree with most of your points but you can definately out train excess calories, probably not if you have other commitments like a family or a job, but if you hike all day everyday or are on an extended bike tour you are probably actually going to have trouble getting enough calories and can basically eat as much as you can without consuming too much.

Saw a documentary about Tour De France riders. They had to force huge plates of spaghetti into themselves every night to the point of throwing up and still lost a ton of weight during the race. It's hard to stay overweight if you are active the whole day.

All this is true, for elite athletes performing at the limit of human ability, you can out-train a bad diet.

The thing is, this only applies during high-level competitions, and in no way counts for the rest of the time. Nobody can compete at that level endlessly, obvious. More importantly, it doesn't raise their basal metabolism beyond a certain point, and the basal metabolism is what counts in overall long-term caloric consumption.

For regular humans, there's simply no getting around the fact that running a mile only burns 100 kCal or so[1], and it's possible to eat more than 100kCal in seconds simply by eating a single Reese's peanut butter cup[2].

1. http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/training/many-calories...

2. https://www.hersheys.com/reeses/en_us/products/reeses-peanut...

No doubt. Unless you do the Tour De France or hike 20 miles per day you have to watch what you eat.

You should see what tourists will pay for certified organic wild Maine blueberries. The only difference between them is they come from a field that wasn't sprayed.

They pay three times the price and six times the wholesale price. They are the same berries, harvested the exact same way.

You can double the price again, if you have someone hand pick them instead of raking them. Even better, you can charge them about the same price and let them pick the berries themselves.

Coconut water was always very popular as soft drink in producing countries. Not waste.

In Brazil, it’s a traditional remedy if you have a bad stomach. It’s also sold at a lot of tourist destinations fresh from the coconut as it’s very refreshing.

Common, but in somewhat limited quantities.

"Anecdotal sources describe coconut water is used in India for the senicide of elderly people, a procedure known as thalaikoothal.[13] In this custom, the elderly person is made to drink an excessive amount of coconut water, eventually resulting in fever and death, the exact causes of which have not been determined.[13]"

In Brazil is extremely common, at least in the south: during the summer you can buy cold green coconuts pretty much everywhere, but specially in the coast; I used to drink it almost daily.

I'm not sure what your point is here.

It's well-known that green coconut vendors are very common in India (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tender_coconut_vendo...). They have a cart of coconuts, chop the top off of one as you watch, and hand it to you to drink. As a tourist, it seemed to me to be safer than drinking water.

So, to the original point above, coconut water is not waste, and is quite refreshing, and fills a useful niche if you're worried about stomach bugs.

I agree it's a common drink, but much like orange juice it's not good in large quantities. So, the reason it ended up as a waste product was supply vastly outstripped demand.

Getting people to value waste byproduct is pretty awesome hacking. It takes a special kind of imagination and guts to say "this trash, I can turn it into treasure."

Where there’s shit, there’s gold. I’m all for people repurposing and selling something that would otherwise go into landfill, etc.

Coconut water, when it's actually fresh (I don't know about after packing/processing), is actually pretty good for drinking, especially since it has various nutrients you don't get out of regular water. Fresh, it isn't something I'd call a "waste byproduct".

The entire superfood craze is about packaging, processing and marketing. Fresh isn't an ingredient, it's subjective.

What I'm trying to get at is that coconut water itself isn't some "waste product". Granted, it be might have been an unused material in some coconut processing pipelines (though I'd be skeptical of that, since anyone that spends time with coconuts knows there's some good stuff in there).

Fresh, for me, refers to having coconut water where the coconut was cut off the tree minutes prior to being opened up. I don't know enough about how Zico and the like are process to speak with any intelligence as to how it might affect the end-product.

EDIT: that being said, I wouldn't pay $6/liter for coconut water. That's overpriced by a long shot, IMO.

I lived on that in India while traveling. Cheap, good and easy to get.

Not to mention that you don't have to worry about it harboring any pathogens, if you're getting it straight out of a coconut. Which is an advantage in places where the water supply is otherwise dubious.

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