real water for the really, really gullible

Normally, I like to stay away from tackling a lot of routine woo that the Mythbusters categorize as “oogy boogy,” the kind of woo that’s not even wrong and should require absolutely no explanation as to why it’s wrong if you happen to be a functioning adult who passed middle school science classes. It’s the kind of woo that comes with descriptions so absurd, it makes you wonder who would ever fall for them. But once in a while, it can be fun to use such ridiculousness as a jump-off point for a little extra snark, like past posts on enchanted baby blankets for a mere $350 to $520 apiece, and the teardown of a homeopath who verbally desecrated over a century of physics and whose numbers were off by a factor of 867 trillion or so. So in the spirit of just letting those who are begging for it have it, I present to you Real Water™, which is loaded with extra electrons for a jolt to your immune system and better hydration, while happily violating everything we know about atoms…

The makers of Real Water claim that during its journey through the various pipes, filters and other treatment systems normal water is “stripped of its electrons”, causing the molecules to “clump”, which prevents them from hydrating our cells. Even worse, the molecules are now “basically free radicals … [which] literally zap or pull away life force from the cell.”

So let me get this straight. Apparently, our normal, plain water is actually ionized and these ions lump into an odd, nefarious molecular slime that sucks away at our “life force” like some a demon in the no budget horror flicks you used to see on the Sci-Fi Channel all the time? What poor, gullible, sad saps buy this load of utter nonsense? Are there really people who are scientifically illiterate and easily impressed enough to pay $36 for a twelve pack of bottled water some scammers probably just filtered from the tap anyway? Ions clumping in a stream of liquid? If that were true, wouldn’t we not have any water in our pipes anymore as all these ions just wander off to make new atoms of their own? If you ever see someone drinking a bottle of Real Water, you will instantly know that this person hasn’t opened a science book after puberty, has more money than sense, and is about as gullible as they come when confronted with a meaningless, jargon-laden word salad. Maybe we should actually thank Affinity, the manufacturer of this product, for giving us a quick and easy way to know with whom we should avoid discussions that may even remotely stray into scientific or critical thought…