Meet “raw” water – ludicrously priced unfiltered water with random bacteria | Hacker News Reader

Meet “raw” water – ludicrously priced unfiltered water with random bacteria

arstechnica.com

88 pointspjl60 comments

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.

I think a real opportunity was missed by not branding this as "Natural Selection" brand water.

Natural Blockchain Selection, for that venture capital money.

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

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.

> 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 )

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.

https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/948215762438803457

Are you also against 100% natural organic snake oil?

is it vegan?

I’m a little sad you got downvotes. Although a slightly better approach might have been, it’s a raw business license. 100% natural and regulation free.

It’s easy to attack snake oil. The meta reference is a bit more amusing, because it has a recursive flavor. It also directly attacks the ethics of the business itself.

The FDA can jail people. Unfortunately, it takes ignoring their orders. By the time that happens in this case, it is reasonably likely that a few people will have died from this.

Are we certain he isn't simply trolling us all on a level so big that he's making money doing it?

Oh he's most certainly doing both.

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.

Yes, well water is generally fine but as you mentioned, there's quite a bit that can be done to make it even safer, which this company apparently neglects, as a selling point.

>My digestive track always gets a little messed up when I visit my parents back home

Not necessarily dangerous, but also not an experience I'd pay $6/gallon for.

>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...

https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/trea...

I can safely drink my well water, but it tastes a lot better if I treat it via my RO system.

My well water tests high for nitrates, as a healthy adult this is not a problem, but giving my water to babies will kill them. By only drinking the treated water I make accidents less likely because all my habits are to tell people don't drink the water except for the filtered drinking water.

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.

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

> My digestive track always gets a little messed up when I visit my parents back home

FWIW, as you mention, if it's hard water this is most likely the culprit. Frequently hard water will have high sulfate levels and sulfate (as in saline laxatives) is not generally well absorbed by the human gut.

My parents home has a well into the kirkwood-cohansey aquifer, with no filters at all, and it is some of the best tasting water I've ever had. Literally the only thing in my life that has beaten it was glacial runoff in the Wapta ice fields

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...

From the makers of Juicero comes Cholera water!

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

My thought as well.

Well that and, _surely this is a hoax._

The results are predictably going to be national news of the if it bleeds it leads variety... <shakes head>

>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?

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.)

>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.

#CholeraDetox2018.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Matt Levine had a pretty funny take on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-02/citi-told...

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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... (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.

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

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...

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...

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)

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.

Your well water was coming from property people you know own, not what some random snake-oil salesman is bottling and selling. Personally, I'd rather not risk it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

  > raw_water == snake_oil

  True

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

Are you supposed to boil it?

I guess this is good news for Wendy Northcutt.

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.

Microparticles of plastic in fish, in most cases, come from the water exiting a water treatment plant that is entering the environment. Some of these microparticles are manufactured, often in beauty or cleanser products, others are the result of plastics breaking down.

While tap water may contain these microparticles of plastic, there's no reason to believe that water out in the wild will be free of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

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.)

>Social conditioning works far better //

Por que no los dos?

Many wells have higher fluoride content than municipal supplies. So if we are wanting to create a complacent society, would have been better to leave people on well water.

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