Bottled and Sold by Peter H. Gleick

Author:Peter H. Gleick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

A New Alchemy

If you can come up with two or more pseudoscientific, hyphenated words—some of them adjectives and one of them “water”—you too can market bottled water as a miracle cure. Ionized water. Vibra-tionally charged interactive water. Alkalized water. Energy-enhanced water infused with luck or love. Clustered water. Weight-loss “skinny” water. Super-oxygenated water. Magnetized water. Rhythm-structured water. Scalarwave-imprinted, hexagonally-structured water. Positive-energy water. Improved fractal-design water. Water infused with Reiki energy. These are just some of the magical bottled waters pushed on ignorant consumers or people with real health concerns who don’t know where else to turn for help. Pseudoscientific claims for bottled waters can be found in brochures, health stores, and magazines, and especially on the Internet. As use of the Internet has exploded, we are seeing a proliferation of websites that make explicit, unsubstantiated, outlandish, and often blatantly fraudulent claims about the health benefits of bottled waters. And we’re sucking it up by the gallon.

Some of these claims are beginning to draw the attention and ire of consumer advocates and debunkers of pseudoscience. Skeptic P. Z. Myers in his blog “Pharyngula” describes claims about “clustered waters” as “pure unadulterated bullshit” peddled by “greased weasels.”15 Famous stage magician and debunker of pseu-doscientific nonsense James Randi calls unproven bottled water claims “deception” and “thievery,” and he has challenged some bottlers to prove their more outlandish assertions and win a million-dollar prize he has offered to anyone capable of proving a paranormal or pseudoscientific claim under laboratory conditions. So far his million dollars is safe.

But where are the federal regulators whose job it is to protect consumers from these kinds of false claims? Didn’t we win this fight more than a hundred years ago, when America put in place laws to guard our foods and drugs against fraud and to end false, unregulated advertising? Nowhere to be seen. Institutions created a century ago to protect the public, like the Food and Drug Administration and FTC, were never strong to begin with, and one of the legacies of the anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-enforcement movement of the past few decades has been to further weaken consumer protections to the point that misleading, unproven claims are rarely challenged.

The Internet has made it much easier both to make such claims and to spread them widely. In theory, advertising on the Internet is subject to the same laws as advertising in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. In reality, advertising on the Internet is less well monitored and consumer protection laws are less frequently enforced. As a result, consumers are far more vulnerable to misleading information and outright fraud than we would have been just a decade ago, when the channels of information reaching us were more limited and more regulated. When advertisers worked solely through traditional media, monitoring was easier, oversight and enforcement more manageable. Today, new mechanisms for fraud develop far faster and are more nimble than government regulation and oversight. More of us get more of our information, advertising, and products online than ever before, from

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