Food-safety expert warns Silicon Valley $60 ‘raw water’ trend could turn deadly
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I really can't recommend it! At least boil the stuff first. Or would that evaporate the magic, too?
Honest question, I have lived in a city my whole life and I would have boiled or at least purified water from either. OTOH, I drink unpasteurized milk so can't judge.
In my experience, people don't routinely treat well water before drinking it.
Yes, this is a silly trend and I wouldn't personally be inclined to drink untreated water that's gone through unknown to me processing and packaging procedures. But water doesn't inherently need to be treated to be drunk regardless of its source.
Applying UV light wouldn't make the water non-raw, since it's not heated above 104 degrees or whatever raw food people believe is the magic number.
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Perhaps I do them a disservice. It would be very interesting, either way, to see what a pathology lab might find to culture from a bottle of their finest.
I know this is anecdotal but everyone I know in "Silicon Valley" drinks tap water (straight from the tap or filtered) or sparkling water. Flavored sparkling water is definitely a fad in the Bay, I've never seen or seen someone consume unfiltered water. Seems very sensationalized.
Tap water from Hetch Hetchy is pretty great (they don't even have to chlorinate it). LaCroix is also a tasty fad.
This stuff is sold in Rainbow Grocery, which has been selling hippie products to Bay Area hippies for decades. While the Venn diagram of techies oftentimes intersects with hippies, they are not the same groups.
On the object level, this stuff is not safe (as others in this thread have mentioned), and I'm sure there will be a lawsuit when someone gets sick from this product. It's not as dangerous as the anti-vaccination madness, but this is still a harmful meme.
That being said, a UV sterilizer (available from most camping stores) will destroy most bacteria and viruses and should leave you with all the minerals and (literal) shit that make this water so delicious. I'm not sure how bottling will affect the dissolved oxygen content though.
About $45. Seems to do a good job for cleaning water, though this particular model may/not have a leaking issue.
Oh, and the way UV light accomplishes the sterilization is via DNA destruction: "UVB light causes thymine base pairs next to each other in genetic sequences to bond together into pyrimidine dimers, a disruption in the strand, which reproductive enzymes cannot copy."
So that's why it can kill viruses, because UVB light 'attacks' the DNA itself, stopping infection and mitosis.
Despite my better judgment, I tried some and it was by far and away the best tasting water I've ever experienced in my life. I stopped at the same spring on the way home, filled up a 5-gallon water jug, and cherished every last drop.
I was aware of the risks and I think it's an alarming trend as well, but gosh darn that water tasted amazing.
- some popular springs are tested by gov/parks regularly and even have results sheet attached
- knowingly bad springs are marked. Maybe as simple as "do not drink" on a sheet of paper in a plastic bag.
- most good springs are prepared. At least home-made step to come without walking in the water/mud, cup to drink from etc. If spring is regularly used by locals - what to worry?
If spring doesn't match any of these - use your judgement. Moving water is good. Stale water is risky. Settlement upstream or on the hill - risky. Farm - very risky!
Boiling is good. Another good idea is hiking bottles with water filters. They do affect taste more than boiling though. I think they're usually carbon-based and/or UV?
Source: drink frequently from springs in/around towns.
>“You can’t stop consenting adults from being stupid,” Marler said. “But we should at least try.”
Something fishy here...
Drinking water from an open spring is dangerous regardless of where it’s form bacteria and parasites isn’t something you want to play with.
I guess that's the problem? Not novelty enough? I suppose this is what happens when you start to worry too much about who/what touches what we ingest. We are almost full circle.
That pretty much exists already and is even sold through amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Sunfood-Apricot-Kernels-Sweet-Organic...
Unless you're talking about Gatorade or Brawndo, which of course has "what plants crave".
https://www.finishing.com/156/65.shtml
What is rain water? It is water distilled by the sun. Are there electrolytes in your spring water that you can't get by eating food... no.
Can you get enough electrolytes just from normal water (e.g. Total Dissolved Solids of 200ppm, not Gatorade) without food that will prevent you from dying of an electrolyte imbalance... no. Eventually, only drinking water will kill you for a variety of reasons (starvation), but you have so much salt already in your body that it will take weeks to kill you.
Only the true elite can afford to flout death with "Raw Water" and the possible health consequences. It's like tanning beds for the 20-teens.
Do them a favor, laugh, and embarass them before they get sick.
(Or anyone who went to school, basically)
I've been drinking, cooking, and showering with aquifer water that only goes through sand for quite some time. Amazing taste, none of the chemical flavor, incredibly "soft" like fresh rain water - that slick feeling as though you have soap on your hands
From my understanding, that's what they're selling here.
Ground (preferably very deep) has far less that can spontaneous go wrong if you follow good practice - no barns or significant domestic animal activity, no composting, etc
Many of the things we try to use to explain this, such as less physical lifestyles (or, equivalently, the rise of the internet) don't really mesh well. These changes are happening everywhere around the world, in many instances to a greater magnitude than the US, but what is happening to the US is fairly unique among developed nations. It seems to imply that something we're doing, or consuming, that we think is healthful - most likely is yielding unforeseen consequences that we haven't quite pin pointed yet. This is further emphasized by the fact that this trend is something that is often confined by borders. For instance the Czech Republic is rapidly headed towards its own issue here, yet it borders Poland, Germany, Austria, and Slovakia - none of whom are facing similar issues in spite of running the gamut among things like socioeconomic status.
Is it the water? Well, probably not. But I think having people who are happy to be guinea pigs here is a good thing for everybody. They get what they want, some entrepreneurs make a few bucks, and in the end we all learn a bit more. An anecdote I particularly like is of the discovery of penicillin. It took years for it to be accepted, even after the discoverer shared and published his findings. And I think a big part of that is that people instinctively felt that using a product from blue-green mold that emerges on rot to try to treat sensitive vulnerable infections was pretty much obviously idiotic - except it wasn't.
With things like vaccines people 'going their own way' can hurt others. In this case, that's not true. Well excepting medical costs if they end up hospitalized, but given the costs of these bottles - I suspect these individuals will disproportionately already have health insurance plans that will not leave society picking up their tab. So in the end, nobody really loses. If you don't think it's a good idea to drink it, don't. I won't - but I'm quite curious to see what happens to those that do!
- According to a review of the literature from 2000, there is little evidence linking the drinking of water in the North American wilderness and Giardia
- Treatment is not always necessary as the infection usually resolves on its own
- It can result in weakness, loss of appetite, stomach cramps, vomiting, bloating, excessive gas, and burping.
Wiki gives about 300,000,000 people with giardiasis. The article mentions 4,600 needed hospitalization. So a hospitalization rate of 0.000005 with the typical consequences being gassy and having the shits for a few weeks. Being afraid of this sort of stuff is simply irrational. Another datum I left off is that 3-7% of Americans already currently have it.
There may be a reason for concern about 'natural' water, but this certainly does not seem to be it.
Many of the livestock around the world have it (or other parasites). I don't want to be near anyone else who has any of them, and I think immuno-compromised, elderly, children or pregnant women would be rationally quite afraid.
I've lived for years in areas where incidence rates of giardia push upwards of 30% - alongside numerous other 'sicknesses'. And there are literally enforced no sanitary standards on food establishments. A big part of the reason for my views is because of my own life experience. Have I had giardia? Almost certainly, though I couldn't tell you for certain. When I first started my travels stomach upset was typical though hardly intolerable. But as I adjusted to less than sterile conditions I'm vastly healthier than ever before - far moreso than my time before in the US where a million rules and regulations tryied to protect me from everything, yet inevitably failed.
There was an interesting study a few years back [1] that sought to study a connection between dust/bacteria and asthma. The results proved to be completely the opposite of what they went in hypothesizing and perhaps even more remarkable. Want to have kids with healthy immune systems free of respiratory disease? Who doesn't? Then make sure they're exposed to all sorts of dirt, bacteria, dust, and all these sorts of fun things - because exposure there is linked to a substantial decline in the risk of later allergies/asthma/etc.
Our immune system is, by far, the most sophisticated tool we have against illness. And priming it is not exactly a new idea - it is the fundamental basis of operation for vaccines. A vaccine is generally just injecting a weakened or otherwise 'handicapped' version of a virus into your body training the immune system to make it more likely to be able to resist the real thing should it encounter it in the world.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/keeping-too-clean-a-house-may-r...
I’m fully in favour of people finding new and interesting ways to remove themselves from the genepool. But this is neither new nor interesting.