I'm wondering why people who are unsatisfied with municipal tap water don't just buy "spring water" or "distilled water", both of which should have less weird stuff in them. And they are standard products available at most supermarkets. Distilled water in particular should be pretty much pure H2O.
>they are standard products available at most supermarkets
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.
This is just the continuing misconception among "trendy" consumers that anything "natural" is better for you in every capacity. It bears mentioning that if cynaide were marketable in any capacity, it'd be fully legal to bill it "all-natural".
The amount of electrolytes in non-distilled (e.g. spring) water is negligible. Any minerals/salts your body needs are easily satisfied by the food you eat.
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.
Distilled water increases the rate at which the body loses essential minerals. You can negate that by ensuring your mineral intake is enough. It's much easier to just water that has minerals in it though.
I'd imagine the appeal is the interaction with our gut biome, which is not only turning out to be one of the most important biomes in our body - but also one of the most poorly understood. We evolved on many things that we now consider unhealthy, which would include running freshwater as a drinking source. And while our life expectancy has increased (though in the US, it is now in decline) that's largely been an issue of reductions in childhood mortality. Ancient Greeks had next to no clue about medicine, relative to what we have today, yet oddly enough many lived comparably long as we do today. Socrates died at 71 by execution. Plato 80, Pythagorus 75, Hippocrates 90, Eratosthenes 82, etc. There's not much survivorship bias there. These individuals made their legacies decades earlier. Aristotle, would be the exception on longevity, having died at a 'young' 62, though we are certainly still familiar with him! Imagine we took our medicine (but not our cultural values) to Ancient Greece. What would their life expectancies have become?
> Silicon Valley is developing an obsession with untreated, unfiltered water, according to The New York Times.
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.
I had giardiasis once, because I drank water straight from a stream. Clearest water I've ever seen outside Yellowstone's hot pools, and it tasted great! A few hours later, my entire digestive tract was doing its level best to turn inside out. It's a hell of a thing - at first you feel like you're dying, and then after a while you realize you aren't but start wishing you would.
I really can't recommend it! At least boil the stuff first. Or would that evaporate the magic, too?
Drinking untreated water from a stream is idiotic, but that's completely different than drinking well water though, which hundreds of millions of Americans do every year without any negative effects. While most wells do have filters, those are just there to get rid of excess sediments. And you can also get rid of any bacteria with UV light without filtering the water, so I'm not seeing where exactly the danger comes in here.
The entire point of ‘raw water’ is that it’s unfiltered and untreated (no UV) and from a spring. I think you may have missed a few details from the article.
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.
I have a well. I am not an authority on them but growing up having one I know it is treated. Our water is "hard" so it goes through a softener which requires a massive amount of salt. There are numerous filters in the basement as well. It isn't pumped from the ground directly to the tap and the system maintainers come and test it periodically when they do maintenance
That's some wells. When I was growing up, my parents' well was pretty much untreated. The water was a acidic so that first morning drink of water tasted of copper. I suspect most of the safety came from arranging the conditions so the water would be safe by default. There is a minimum depth for the well and it needs to be a certain distance from the septic system.
Pretty much. A spring does imply water coming to the surface naturally. However, in practice, a large bottler is probably pumping water from an underground aquifer in any case.
In my experience, people don't routinely treat well water before drinking it.
I don't know the details of this particular "spring" but generally speaking there's not necessarily anything especially dangerous about water pumped from an underground water source. As the parent noted, it's really no different from the well water that many many people routinely drink without any treatment.
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.
If the spring is safe, there are no risks (kind of tautological, I know). Millions of people drink mineral water (Evian, Volvic, etc) and that's not treated. All you need is quality control.
I confide Evian's bottlers are very assiduous about ensuring their products contain few or no potentially pathogenic microorganisms. Of Silicon Valley randos I'm not so sure.
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 took a trip up to Oregon for the eclipse over the summer. One of my campmates filled their water containers from the Shasta spring on the way up. Untreated. Unfiltered. Straight from the mouth of the spring.
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.
My strategy was to wait a day or two and see if my buddy got sick before I tried it. But, yeah, after seeing the other comment here, boiling probably would have been a good idea!
I once drank a bottle of lake water straight from the lake, way out in the wilderness in northern Ontario. No negative effects. I don't remember the water tasting particularly good or bad.
Ugh. Don't do that. The water is disgusting in Ontario. There are some pretty strong guidelines regarding eating fish from there too. Heard stories from people who need to test it and filter it for injectables. It's not out in the wilderness, but it's still a good idea to just avoid it. So you drank one bottle that's different from sustained consumption.
Of course it varies around the world, but in my whereabouts there're few rules-of-thumb regarding such springs:
- 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?
I once drank lake water in Iceland during winter. The only reason I could be convinced to do so was because it was Iceland during the winter. It was absolutely fantastic. Easily the best tasting water I've had by an order of magnitude.
I once drank water from a natural spring in Kolomenskoye Park in the middle of Moscow. Tasted great with no ill effects. Don't know if it's safe for chronic consumption though.
95% it is safe. If it wasn't, it'd be marked as such. The spring doesn't need much space. Rain drops, gets filtered by sand and soil, comes out from a spring down bellow. A park of few hundred square meters is more than enough to be a safe filter.
Source: drink frequently from springs in/around towns.
I would be very surprised if the bottled mineral water I buy from Sainsburys has not been filtered after being drawn from whatever well or spring it came from.
I can't imagine the liability involved for the vendors selling this stuff.
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.
Living on the SW corner of Lake Erie, I have access to the rawest water of all, with it ripening every July-August. For any intetested in the effects raw water can have on your health, I'd be happy to price-match against SmartWater at your local grocer... ;)
Business Insider is trying to make this story stick, but this is not a "Silicon Valley" trend. Shameless clickbait.
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.
When I hear 'food safety expert' in the US, it kind of makes me curious. I decided to search for an image of our expert, playing the favorable odds I suppose, and was not surprised: http://tobecofoodsafety.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/bill-... There's a giant elephant in the room when it comes to healthfulness in the US. Our life expectancy has actually be going down, even when it was already relatively mediocre - lower than even some places like Chile and Costa Rica. Mortality rates from 8 of the top 10 killers, heart disease in particular, have been increasing alongside our waistlines.
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!
They can get and spread Giardia. It's fairly common and that would be bad. Even the other strange diseases they could communicate to a family member or immuno-compromised co-worker isn't a small deal either.
My cynicism towards 'health experts' is not unjustified. The wiki page on giardiasis [1] gives a good overview of some data. Some random snippets:
- 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.
You have clearly never had Giardia or it seems known anyone who has. I have, and let me say that it gives you a deep and terrifyingly intimate knowledge of your bowels, the places available to relieve yourself, and the contents of your excrement. You can spend many hours each day in wonder and awe. Note that although you can live untreated you will become a vector for the disease... it may be that an immune response will allow it to pass in a few days (if you've had it several times before), but you can still pass it on to others. Often symptoms last for several weeks or months unless treated with flagyl (typical treatments last 1-2 weeks). It is quite bad for your liver.
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.
It's unwise to speculate of things you know nothing of.
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.
I don’t think we really need a few guinea pigs to teach us about surface water. Most of us have learnt everything we need to know from three decades of TV adverts begging us to send £2 a week to help dig wells in Africa.
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.
Overblown concerns if pulled from a known good and tested source. Modern well technology and practices make the risks nill if followed; untreated surface water is an entirely different story and risky.
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
Yikes, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed they drilled to the source below ground. Literally anything can happen on surface water - one of your workers comes to work sick and shoots a snot rocket into the creek fed by the spring, rabid skunk dies and tumbles in, etc.
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
There's a trend rising for raw exotic water from Africa, I've heard. They haven't plenty of it so it's rare and quite exclusive! Retail sales only to rich white folks - USD 100k per barrel per person only! Get one while you can - reservations are already being accepted!
Wow! This is batshit. Silicon Valley reminds me of a medieval court with its retarded and pompous fashions.
If you want to waste money on stupid shit I made a Bitcoin address just now:
1Fn4rH1SvshzWDxCjCMkzNoAfgfqRgTVX1
The proceeds will be used to buy alcohol for the homeless locally and if I get enough I will fly to San Francisco to do it there. I'll keep whatever is left after I get bored of the process. It's really cold up north right now so proof will be posted once it gets warmer as a reply to to this comment with a link.
The number of commenters defending/sympathizing with raw water proves Silicon Valley is vulnerable to this kind of hysteria. I'm routinely horrified by how many people here fetishize the natural, without understanding that Nature is a hostile force that wants to kill us! We should all be grateful for the Wall of Science that protects us from Nature. (Source: MS Biology)
83 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadI 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.youtube.com/watch?v=GFD2ggNxR1g
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.
>“You can’t stop consenting adults from being stupid,” Marler said. “But we should at least try.”
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.
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.
</s>
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_DNA_damage
(Or anyone who went to school, basically)
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.
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giardiasis
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.
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
If you want to waste money on stupid shit I made a Bitcoin address just now: 1Fn4rH1SvshzWDxCjCMkzNoAfgfqRgTVX1
The proceeds will be used to buy alcohol for the homeless locally and if I get enough I will fly to San Francisco to do it there. I'll keep whatever is left after I get bored of the process. It's really cold up north right now so proof will be posted once it gets warmer as a reply to to this comment with a link.