There’s a story making the rounds on websites, some newspapers, and wire services like UPI saying that the EU has banned any statement (such as on bottled water) that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration.”
We’ve been so accustomed to seeing stupidity from government lately, that this seemed plausible. But it isn’t.
Here’s a link link to the actual ruling:
There’s also a statement from EFSA clarifying the issue, they write:
Among those claims was a claim related to the role of water in the prevention of dehydration filed earlier this year by two German scientists. At the time, the claim had to be rejected by EFSA because it was filed under the wrong legal provision (Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006/EC instead of Article 13). In short, Article 14 deals with diseases and illnesses whereas dehydration was not regarded by EFSA as a disease.
I’ve checked out these two pages and the rejection based on it being filed in the wrong context seems accurate. Thanks to Maurizio Morabito for pointing out the EFSA link.
A lot of people got taken in by the incorrect Newspaper and wire reports, and they continue to spread. Here’s Alec Rawls original story below.
Update: I’ve added Alec’s further comments below, claims and counterclaims leave this issue unresolved. – Anthony
Thanks to Anthony for including the EFSA response at the beginning of my post. Comparing the their “clarifications” with the actual ruling, however, I have to say that the Express reporting seems to be accurate, while the EFSA’s clarifications grossly misrepresent their ruling.
The clarification asserts that EFSA issued a pro-forma rejection of the proposed health claim on the grounds that dehydration is not recognized as a disease, leaving the implication that since no actual health claim was made, there would be no prohibition on making it. The ruling itself however, quite clearly does accept that dehydration IS a disease. Their actual grounds for rejecting the proposed claim was a bizarre assessment that the claim does not address a risk factor for the disease, but only a measure of the disease, and hence is not a valid claim about reduction of a risk factor.
This is incredibly stupid. Failure to drink enough water is not a risk factor for dehydration? Just to try to make this distinction is nonsensical enough, but then they get it wrong to boot, on the most trivially simple matter: can drinking water help prevent dehydration? Here are the key parts of the ruling:(1) Pursuant to Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 health claims made on foods are prohibited unless they are authorised by the Commission in accordance with that Regulation and included in a list of permitted claims.
(6) … the applicant proposed water loss in tissues or reduced water content in tissues as risk factors of dehydration. On the basis of the data presented, the Authority concluded in its opinion received by the Commission and the Member States on 16 February 2011 that the proposed risk factors are measures of water depletion and thus are measures of the disease. Accordingly, as a risk factor in the development of a disease is not shown to be reduced, the claim does not comply with the requirements of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 and it should not be authorised.
They do declare the claim unauthorized, meaning disallowed, which would not be the case if they had ruled that it was not actually a health claim. So everything in the clarification is just a fraud. It seems they got embarassed when people noticed how stupid their ruling was and concocted a completely dishonest excuse.
Saturday not-so-funny: Europeans can now be imprisoned (2 yrs!) for claiming that water protects against dehydration
Guest post by Alec Rawls
“It took the 21 scientists on the panel three years of analysis into the link between water and dehydration to come to their extraordinary conclusion,” reports the UK Express. To be precise, the European Union has barred vendors from claiming that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration.” Apparently there are some skeptics:
Perhaps a dictionary would have helped. Dehydration, from “hydor,” the Greek word for water, means to lose water, or suffer water deprivation.
“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true,” says Conservative MEP Roger Helmer.
Wait a minute. How does an anti-science flat-earther like Helmer rate mainstream ink? Leave science to the scientists!
I’ve been telling people about this for years – it’s not CO2 we need to worry about, it’s the dreaded dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO).
For example, the following effects from DHMO have been recorded:
Dihydrogen monoxide:
– is the major component of acid rain.
– contributes to the “greenhouse effect”.
– may cause severe burns.
– is fatal if inhaled.
– contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
– accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
– may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
– has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:
as an industrial solvent and coolant.
in nuclear power plants.
in the production of Styrofoam.
as a fire retardant.
in many forms of cruel animal research.
in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
as an additive in certain “junk-foods” and other food products.
It’s all true – I saw it on the internet at DHMO.org.
So it’s no wonder that the EU calls this stuff unhealthy. There’s so much DHMO on the planet, we’re practically swimming in the stuff!
/sarc
Actually, after contemplating this rule for a bit, it seems that the only way to obtain water once it goes into effect, is to harvest watermelons (pun intended).
Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:
November 19, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Thank You! 🙂
henrythethird says:
November 19, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Ha ha ha ha 🙂
The Telegraph reports:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/EU-bans-claim-that-water-can-prevent-dehydration.html
Well you learn something every day, eh? I thought water was H20 Two molecules of Hydrogen and one of Oxygen. It comes from the sky or from underground aquifers, bores and wells. The latter can contain contaminants of course including bacteria. In severe cases of blood loss or dehydration, one does require a intravenous saline plus glucose. As I said Anthony, you learn something every day. Actually, I was told by a Chinese doctor, to drink 2 liters of H20 a day and take a pinch of rock or sea salt on my food. (Not table salt). Not coffee or soft drinks, although cordials mixed in it were acceptable. It cleans out the lymphatic system and the skin. Some years ago, one of the famous brands of bottled water, I think it was Perrier, but don’t quote me on that, was found to have something in it that was not considered too healthy. Personally although I do have a rain water tank, I won’t drink it. Mainly because long standing water tanks can be collect bacteria that can be quite harmful. (Bird droppings getting into the tank from the roof for example). And we did have a new 205 foot deep bore on our property, and it tasted terrible. You would have to dieing from thirst to consume it. It was heavily tainted with iron and limestone. Somewhere between the taste of caster oil and epsom salts. Now I feel thirsty, so long for now.
Aha…….after careful deliberation I know the root cause of this ruling.
There was no water offered to these 21 fellows who were/are so smart. After 16 hours of intense deliberation……(becoming dehydrated because to prove they are correct, they didn’t drink water)…….they decided that drinking water would NOT fix their condition.
And ya know? I don’t know if there is enough water in the world to fix stupid.
And that’s the reason I consume large quanties of beer. By the case it’s cheaper than individual bottles of water at the local 7-11 and it has nutritional value that keeps me fat in case of famine. On occasion it does give me headaches, though.
One of the problems that we have, and a serious one at that, is our public discourse has become very uncivil. As always, you should ask yourself: WWJD? Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Substitute ‘Muslim’ for ‘Samaritan’ and you will have your answer.
LOL. Maybe as some people have said before, one can get to a nation by putting something in their water supply. Anyone suggest what they might have put in the Eurozone’s water? I remember one bottled water firm, were had up for fraud, they were selling miracle water, and it was found they were getting it from the tap. Anyone seen that hilarious film ‘Water’ with Michael Caine and Billy Connolly. They found something better than oil on this far flung British dominion in the South Seas. A water that had a laxative effect. Sold millions.
Well in some places Jesse, consuming beer is better than consuming their tap water. (Unless you boil the b out of it). True. LOL. I interviewed our local water resources official once, and people were complaining that floride and chlorine was being added to their water supply. He told me,
our water is healthy. Most of the worst human afflictions and health problems are water borne.
That’s why I prefer treated water to rain water.
Thanks to Anthony for including the EFSA response at the beginning of my post. Comparing the their “clarifications” with the actual ruling, however, I have to say that the Express reporting seems to be accurate, while the EFSA’s clarifications grossly misrepresent their ruling.
The clarification asserts that EFSA issued a pro-forma rejection of the proposed health claim on the grounds that dehydration is not recognized as a disease, leaving the implication that since no actual health claim was made, there would be no prohibition on making it. The ruling itself however, quite clearly does accept that dehydration IS a disease. Their actual grounds for rejecting the proposed claim was a bizarre assessment that the claim does not address a risk factor for the disease, but only a measure of the disease, and hence is not a valid claim about reduction of a risk factor.
This is incredibly stupid. Failure to drink enough water is not a risk factor for dehydration? Just to try to make this distinction is nonsensical enough, but then they get it wrong to boot, on the most trivially simple matter: can drinking water help prevent dehydration? Here are the key parts of the ruling:(1) Pursuant to Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 health claims made on foods are prohibited unless they are authorised by the Commission in accordance with that Regulation and included in a list of permitted claims.
They do declare the claim unauthorized, meaning disallowed, which would not be the case if they had ruled that it was not actually a health claim. So everything in the clarification is just a fraud. It seems they got embarassed when people noticed how stupid their ruling was and concocted a completely dishonest excuse.
Good one Alec. If it is bleedin’ hot or one is running long distances, H20 plus some other additives help keep you body’s metabolism stable. Without the body consuming itself to keep going. Anyway, this EU is consuming itself by collapsing while not advertising how stupid they are on so called climate change, carbon credits, and clean energy. Plague on both their houses, eh?
I have read too many regulations around food and especially health claims and this is actually a sensible rule. If you wish to make any health related claim on a product, you have to be able to back it up with sufficient proofs. You can advertise all you like, but a health claim (defined whichever way they want) has to to have proof.
Now, it might sound simple to prove that your bottled water “cures” dehydration, but having been involved in a few too many of these cases, I can assure you that such proofs (to the satisfaction of regulatory agencies) are not trivial. Furthermore, while it might also sound silly to prevent such a claim on a bottle of water, at which stage do you allow claims because they are “obvious”? There is no such thing as “obvious” and therefore if you want to make a claim you have to back it up with the data as required.
Dear comment monitor: did you see that I screwed up the blockquote html in my previous comment? By mistake I put a backslash on the opening tag for the excerpt from the EFSA ruling. Can you possibly fix that for me?
The excerpt begins with the (1) and ends before the last three sentences, which are my commentary: “They do declare the claim unauthorized, meaning disallowed, which would not be the case if they had ruled that it was not actually a health claim. So everything in the clarification is just a fraud. It seems they got embarassed when people noticed how stupid their ruling was and concocted a completely dishonest excuse.”
Henry III provides a very biassed view of what he calls “DHMO” or “dihydrogen monoxide”. To begin with this name is extremely misleading, calling to mind the toxic gas carbon monoxide, while misrepresenting its chemical structure. In reality the neutral name “hydrogen hydroxide” is to be preferred.
As to his claims, while most are true they greatly distort the facts. Hydrogen hydroxide is the major part of acid rain, but serves to dilute the acidification somewhat (although pure hydrogen hydroxide, with a pH of 7, can never completely eliminate acidification on its own). In its gaseous form, it is indeed the major greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, but without it cloudformation and therefore the rain that irrigates our crops would be completely impossible; it is in that regard a double-edged sword.
In order to cause severe burns, hydrogen hydroxide needs to be heated; at room temperature it is no more dangerouse than milk or vegetable oil and very probably less dangerous when consumed in ordinary quantaties. In fact, due to its lower boiling point and our skins natural tendency to let it fall off it is ordinarily less dangerous than heated oil.
His claim that it is “fatal if inhaled” is perhaps the worst of the lot. In its gaseous form, most people inhale it daily to no ill effect; it is, much like carbon dioxide, ignored by our lungs. Inhaling pure gaseous hydrogen hydroxide might make it difficult to obtain the necessary quantities of oxygen, but there are already regulations mandating minimum quantities of oxygen and other necessary gases in working conditions, and there is no known natural environment on Earth consisting of pure gaseous hydrogen hydroxide.
In its liquid form, it is fatal to “inhale”; but any liquid is, include benign household liquids such as vegetable oil (perhaps the most common liquid contaning no hydrogen hydroxide in most people’s kitchens). It is not the liquid hydrogen hydroxide per se that is the problem, but the absence of gaseous oxygen. We all know we need to breathe air, not solids or liquids, so this is a furphy.
As for his other claims, they’re also quite bizarre. For instance, oxygen is the element which actually causes corrosion, yet no-one would claim we should ban oxygen from the atmosphere; the very notion is ludicrous.
WUWT should know better than to publish such cherry-picked nonsense. If it is to retain any credibility, it must delete it at once.
commieRob: Point taken, however, many claims on food and drinks do have to be taken with a pinch of salt. (Pun). False advertising is one and this is what that announcement was all about. Dehydration can be acute or chronic, for example if you suffer gastric problems such as Cholera, you die from dehydration in the end, unless you replace the fluids lost. It has to be done intravenously, not by mouth. (You may not be able to keep even water down by mouth?) I think this announcement is a bit of a knee jerk. A child with uncontrolled diabetes, type 1, will have a tremendous unusual thirst, because his/her kidneys work overtime to expel the increased glucose in their blood stream, and the body is literally starving to death because of the lack of insulin. The causation factor of dehydration can’t be cured sometimes by just drinking water, however, it can avoid it in hot weather when you sweat and breath out too much fluids in comparison with your intake. Maybe in someways, the manufacturers, should just state, ‘make sure you drink water in very hot weather or after excessive exercise to avoid dehydration’. And not make it a cure all for all cases of dehydration, that might need urgent medical attention.
Please be careful here, friends. Sure, the overwhelming consensus of scholarly opinion is that water is not harmful, indeed that it is necessary. The science is settled on that point. The argument is over.
But is it really? Remember, we’ve all battled against “overwhelming consensus”, “the science is settled”, and “the argument is over”. Yet as I read your comments, you’re all using those very same arguments, the arguments you have previously claimed were not scientific. Where has your proper scientific skepticism fled?
A small but courageous minority have long inveighed against the dangers, even the lethality of water. The first such researcher I know of is from the 1930s, the great Dr. William C. Dukenfield. After his great discovery he never drank water again, yet lived on to a happy old age.
Many of us have followed where he has led. Go ahead: Google him. But prepare to be enlightened.
And must I say it? Shame on you all for using the same arguments against these valiant, stalwart few that have been for so many years used against you. Do we never learn?
Another convoluted aspect of this story: what is being presented as an EFSA clarification was posted and apparently composed, not by EFSA, but by a group called EFBW (the European Federation for Bottled Water):
http://www.efbw.eu/news.php?ID=41
Meanwhile the EFSA website seems to be silent on the controversy:
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/press.htm
Did EFBW post the clarification at the behest of EFSA, or just to brown-nose their regulators? Given the glaring falsity of the clarification, this is an important question. If EFSA was the ultimate source of the dishonest rebuttal, that’s pretty serious bad behavior for a government entity, and probably violates EU laws (never mind being just plain sparky for a truth-in-advertising watchdog).
If the dishonest rebuttal was EFBW’s own brown-nosing operation, then it’s just private bad behavior. Well, if EFSA dosen’t correct EFBW’s account, that will make them complicit. I’d say this bears following.
DHMO creates the most prevalent and potent of all greenhouse gases. It can be fatal on overdose and contributes to a large proportion of accidental deaths. Strict government controls are clearly necessary and this dangerous substance should clearly not be used except under medical supervision.
Can you imagine what could happen if a small child gets his or her hands on this lethal chemical?
I am therefore sponsoring bold legislation to make DHMO a controlled substance available only by prescription. The manufacture, synthesis, extraction, collection, distribution, sale, or possession of unlicensed quantities in excess of 1 milligram of DHMO will carry serious criminal penalties.
I accept that we may see a slight uptick in the number of dehydration cases admitted to our emergency rooms but that would be a small price to pay to rid our streets of this exceedingly harmful chemical compound.
A new European Agency will be funded to regulate DHMO distribution and track the consumption of all such material. Citizens will be required to attend special DHMO testing centers weekly where blood or urine samples will be screened for traces of unlicensed DHMO.
bushbunny says:
November 19, 2011 at 8:24 pm
This is incorrect. The primary treatment for cholera is oral rehydration using a mixture of boiled or distilled water, salts, potassium, and sugar. Intravenous solutions are for severe cases of dehydration, usually because of delayed treatment or severe cases of vomiting. Gatorade works well too if you add a couple of teaspoons of sugar to it.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholera/DS00579/DSECTION=treatments%2Dand%2Ddrugs
How dare companies use spin to advertise products.The only entity allowed to do that is the government.
All the big claims made about wind and solar,no restrictions on what the manufacterers of these products can claim.
Richards in Vancouver at 9:24 pm . .
W C Dukenfields – I looked him up , and sure was enlightened . . .! 🙂
He must be oustanding in his FIELDS . . especially when using his initials W. C. !
Scott D. My son as an infant got some terrible gastric upset passing blood. I had to give him fluid by the teaspoon, no bottled milk, and lemonade with sugar in it to disperse the bubbles. If he drank it too quickly he’d vomit it up. Worrying time, sunken eyes, etc. He wasn’t on solid food for
10 days. Probably contributed to him developing diabetes 15 months later. The cholera treatment was told to me, by a nurse a Captain in the QA’s. Mind you, this was 45 years ago in Malaysia. Because Cholera generally comes from contaminated water and food. But they have to get to hospital quick. And treatment is by intravenous eventually if they can’t hold down fluids.
Actually, everyone seems to have got the story quite wrong. First, the Europeans are promoting the drinking of water in large amounts on health grounds:
This is terrible advice. There is no reason whatever to think that for the normal adult male in normal European temperatures and at moderate levels of physical activity should rink 2.5 liters of water a day. The result would be hyponatremia.
This recommendation is nothing more than a sell out to the bottled water lobby, which in turn is largely owned by soft drink conglomerates.
It is in fact entirely reasonable to ban advertising or promotional material which claims that excessive consumption of water is healthy or is necessary to preserve health or prevent an imaginary condition called ‘dehydration’. Of course there is such a thing as dehydration – it occurs in people genuinely deprived of adequate water or those with illnesses such as cholera which lead to excessive fluid loss and inability to replace orally.
But the idea that we are all in Western Europe, summer and winter alike, threatened with this condition if we do not drink 2+ liters a day, day in and day out, is complete hysteria and superstition, and to promote bottled water with such claims is fraudulent.
I will close by pointing out something serious which has occurred as a result of this insane myth. What do people die of when running marathons in hot weather? Dehydration, you probably think. Wrong. They die of drinking too much water. The reason is they get into hyponatremia, a condition in which the body’s salts are too diluted, because of having drunk too much water without salts in it.
The water drinking mania is an example of the hysterical health fads, often the results of marketing campaigns by Big Food or Big Drink, which have no basis in science or commonsense or experience. Fortunately almost no-one but a few total obsessives really tries to keep drinking this much water.
The correct prescription is simple: when you are hungry, eat. When you are tired, sleep. When you are thirsty, drink. And no, you do not need to drink several liters a day to avoid getting thirsty, and no, when you feel thirsty it is not too late. Any more than you should quickly go down to MacDonalds before you feel hungry in case you fall into a dreaded condition called malnutrition. Which is a real medical condition, and the result of not eating enough of the right things, but not something anyone in Western Europe needs to guard against by eating when not hungry.