Forget searching for The Fountain of Youth, all you need is right here in the bottle, which is being dubbed as the new Elixir of Life. From the UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO and the “overworked kidneys: department comes this odd study with an even odder claim. I don’t know about you, but bottled water has been solely about convenience in situations where water isn’t always easily available, such as camping and outdoor activities. OTOH climate protagonist Peter Gleick has made a career out of hating bottled water, so perhaps that explains why he acts and looks as he does.
Bottled water sales fueled by desire for immortality
A fear of dying plays a role in people buying bottled water, even though they know it may not be good for them or the planet, a study from the University of Waterloo has found.
The study suggests that most bottled-water advertising campaigns target a deep psychological vulnerability in humans, compelling them to buy and consume particular products. Bottled water ads specifically trigger our most subconscious fear — driving Canadians to buy billions of litres of water annually.
“Bottled water advertisements play on our greatest fears in two important ways,” says Stephanie Cote, who conducted the research while a graduate student at Waterloo. “Our mortality fears make us want to avoid risks and, for many people, bottled water seems safer somehow, purer or controlled.
“There is also a deeper subconscious force at work here, one that caters to our desire for immortality.”
In 2013, according to a report by Euromonitor, Canadians bought 2.4 billion liters of bottled water. In 2018, that amount is expected to rise to three billion liters worth CAD$3.3 billion, despite ongoing and energetic anti-bottled water campaigns.
The study used social psychology’s Terror Management Theory (TMT) as its framework. TMT researchers argue that people’s efforts to repress conscious and unconscious fear of death generates specific defenses that influence behaviours such as consumption choices, the accumulation of wealth, and status security.
The research team analyzed data drawn from the content of bottled water campaigns and advertisements, websites, photographs, and videos that revealed implicit and explicit meanings. They also examined how anti-bottled water campaigns have trouble competing with corporate bottled water messaging.
“Our results demonstrate that corporate campaigns appeal to people who measure their personal value by their physical appearance, fitness levels, material and financial wealth, class, and status,” said Sarah Wolfe, a researcher in Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment. “Pro-bottle water advertisements rely heavily on branding, celebrity, and feel-good emotions that trigger our group identities and patriotism.
“If public and non-governmental organizations were interested in promoting the benefits of municipal drinking water systems, they’re going to need to use new tactics that are emotionally stirring and speak to more than just the financial, ethical and environmental benefits of tap water.”
The study, titled: Evidence of mortality salience and psychological defenses in bottled water campaigns, appeared in the Journal Applied Environmental Education & Communication. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1533015X.2017.1399836?journalCode=ueec20
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For a good part of the world, bottled water is the only clean and trusted water available to them.
Correct, and will remain so until those parts of the world are allowed to have safe, secure, cost effective energy with which to establish their infrastructure.
Well said, GS.
Stephen,
that may be true but it doesn’t apply to Canada where this research was carried out.
many cities over chlorinate the water to the point it is like drinking from a public swimming pool. hence the bottled water. sadly Arkell springs water (in the picture) gets the fluoride treatment in much of its bottled water.
Well, except for our First Nations reserves…
One of the charities my wife and I support help dig wells so people can have clean water.
Once you have the living water trying for immortality by your own efforts doesn’t seem so important.
Jesus said to her “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” John 4:10
James Bull
Well said James.
I visited a shop on a Greek island where they were selling masses of bottled water to tourists. Just around the back, some guy was filling up the bottles with water from a hosepipe.
It used to be that Flint Michigan built cars and you could not drink the water in Mexico. Now, Mexico builds cars and you cannot drink the water in Flint Michigan.
If the water in your country isn’t safe to drink … does that make you a 3rd world s#ithole country ? I would answer that a resounding YES! And, I won’t be making Air B&B arrangements anywhere in the 3rd world State of Michigan
And you still can’t drink the water in Mexico.
Many rural areas do not have good well water due to factors such as taste and/or odor.
City residents think that all you have to do is turn on the water tap and you have good drinking water?
That’s what happens when you end having to pay over $1,000 per car you make in health benefits to retirees and those no longer employed by you.
It’s simply amazing how much I don’t give a hoot.
OOPS!
I forgot to include the rest of the quote….but, somehow, it makes more sense this way.
PS What soft-drink or pop or soda or car or beer or granola bar or food or drug or…well…ANY commercial for just about anything isn’t doing the same thing?
PPS Forsake the Fountain of Living Waters and immortality becomes a mute issue.
‘..mute?’ Or: ‘…moot’?
😎
“Moot”.
(“Until Then” the present would much …quieter… if the objectors to His solution were “mute”. Someday they will be.)
Not surprising at all for peoples who have limited access to safe, potable water. Not contracting Typhus does tend to lengthen ones lifespan.
In a related story … many African’s still believe if adult AIDS patients has sex with a virgin girl … it will cure them of AIDS. Enough said.
Stupidity and ignorance go hand in hand with communicable diseases.
@ jorgekafkazar,
Focus man, focus!
You have to appreciate that bottled water is important to Westerners, it’s a life defining thing!
It says so much about their lives.
Or maybe we just like it? Just spit-balling here.
I don’t enjoy sugary drinks, so I tend to drink chardonnay. Water is for when I’ve had enough wine and have no particular desire to drink until I fall over. All up I drink more water than all other drinks combined. That’s despite my love for real coffee and estate tea.
As for immortality, I’m planning my eventual demise when the pain becomes too much to bear. And no, I don’t believe in an afterlife.
Time was in my hippy days we advised people to drink water instead of Coke/Pepsi/Tizer. Why the greenie-weenies want us to drink the latter instead of water is a bit of a mystery to me…
Tea is fine. Tea will make you quite immortal. Tannic acid is present in roasted tea leaves, and as we all know, tannic acid is used in tanning leather. Some leathers, if properly cared for last hundreds of years.
Drink tea, live forever.
@sara
Indeed.
I am reliably informed that Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah, along with their wives, sons and daughters all drank copious amounts of tea. 😊
Does not the recipe for tea cite the need to boil the water?
That, of course, helps kill some germs and drives off some odors.
Also, vines make grapes and grapes make wine, and the wine* won’t kill you but the water might. [ * reasonable amounts ]
Those ancient folks were wise.
Pompous Git claims to prefer Charodnnay. There’s no explaining taste, but it is better than our well water.
Our well water isn’t fit to drink, mostly because of non-oxidized (reduced) iron.
We have a filtration system, rather than buying water.
Wine is bottled sunshine. That explains the phrase “A day without wine is like a day without sunshine.
Cheers.
Never boil the water you use with green tea. It will turn the tea brown and destroy the taste. Just hot water is sufficient and let it cool to room temperature. Very tasty.
In wine there is truth
In beer there is strength
in water there is bacteria
The tap water is good where I live, thanks to the infrastructure and society that supports its function.
Mostly I use a steel thermos bottle and refill it as needed. That being said, I go through a case of 500 ml bottles of water about every 2 months. I buy it for the convenience of having a bottle stashed in the car, or if somebody wants to grab drink for the road.
Did these over-educated nitwits ever consider the fact that many people who don’t want to drink municipal water simply like the convenience of bottled water? Or a host of other reasons? Of course not. Intellectual onanism.
The question is, in Canada, why on earth would someone not want to drink municipal water? The odd fact that many people have the notion that bottled water is better for you (and will make you live longer) is what this study is investigating.
The answer for many in Canada is foul tasting and looking potable water, old rusty supply pipes, not to mention fluoride. The three municipalities that I have lived in, each of them has never used fluoride in the water.
BTW All this is demonstrating is that advertising works.
What will they study next? perhaps the psychology behind ad campaigns to market anti-aging creams?
There is even some TV ad currently running where some odd looking bar tender is offering clients “water with a safe acceptable level of lead” or words like that. Of course the patrons are foolishly aghast that the water should contain any lead at all. I can’t remember the product they were hustling, but my guess it wasn’t tap water.
People are afraid of what they don’t understand. Fear motivates. Fools understand very little so are easily frightened, and easily duped.
Seems to be a pattern here…..
Indeed… this reminds me, that just recently I did read an analysis chart on a bottled water with listed lead content. And it wasn’t zero. It made me pause for a second and then I shrugged because it can’t be, can it? I didn’t have my phone to take a picture then. I must, must, remember to visit the water isle next time and find it.
I might be fantasizing now, but I believe it was one of the expensive waters that claim to be healing water. … hope this post is enough of a mental post to help me remember.
Melinda, what essentially the listed data demonstrate is our ability to measure minute portions of compounds, not what any of the values mean. Without some rational factor that the average schmo can understand, it’s meaningless to him. By all means list the absolute amount, but also list its relative amount to safe levels. XX ppm is meaningless, but if it also stated the value is 10 times below acceptable levels the information may be more useful.
Agree. It would help the average customer if the average customer would actually study the listings -that most people above 45 need glasses to be able to read. But I suppose they don’t -they are very content to read the bold letters saying “pure, natural, healing, healthy…” whatever.
Small-bottled water is largely just a life-style choice. Unless you are threatened with cholera on vacation in deepest India, it is unnecessary for most Westerners. FFS, it’s just frickin’ water. In a plastic bottle. There are many alternative sources of safe hydration.
Paradoxically, in my experience, many of the people who obsess more over bottled water are the same types of people who want to hate plastic. Boy, do they have issues. But that’s their problem, not mine.
“There are many alternative sources of safe hydration.”
Indeed. Laphroaig, decent chardonnay, arabicas coffee… But they are all a lot more expensive than water. This latter we collect from rainfall on the roof and a back of envelope calc indicates it costs me about a dollar a kilolitre. Due to a lack of interest in poisoning myself, we don’t chlorinate or fluoridate it and the taste is indistinguishable from bottled spring water. A $2 bottle of spring water can be refilled numerous times before needing replacement.
Water OTOH is dangerous; very dangerous. I received the following from Mrs Git a couple of hours ago:
“Mike Peters has died – found down at Shipwrights Point in the water with his hands in his pockets. He must have been out for a stroll and slipped and hit his head I guess.” I can’t recall anyone locally drowning in beer, but Mike’s the second drowning in the river this year. RIP Mike.
How do you insure your catch basin does not become contaminated with bacteria? Chlorine is the easiest and safest way to insure healthy drinking water.
But never, never mix the Laphroaig with the water (in any of its phases). It’s just not done.
If you are keen on sweet watery whiskey, may I suggest a nice Speyside. 😉
“How do you insure your catch basin does not become contaminated with bacteria? Chlorine is the easiest and safest way to insure healthy drinking water.”
We don’t bother treating our water supply. While the nearby (chlorinated) municipal supply develops a green algal bloom when left in a clear bottle on a sunny window shelf for a few days, our water remains unsullied. Chlorinating water kills the bacteria, but chlorine also reacts with organic matter to form any number of organo-chlorine compounds, many of which are mutagenic and/or carcinogenic. See:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a958/a48a9f19851436325b66c1a84cf48b4c0a2d.pdf
I’d hazard a guess and say boiling water is safer than treating it with chlorine. It doesn’t make the water taste and smell bad either.
Bugger, Forgot to address the first question. We don’t transfer water from below 400mm depth in the 1200mm deep collection tank. The pump that transfers the water to the 22,500 litre supply tank runs on an automated float switch.
As a resident of Waterloo I can speak for those who refuse to drink the calcium carbonate laced groundwater that comes down the rusty pipes. I buy filtered, clean water in 18 litre bottles from a vending machine because it is drinkable. It is that simple.
It is funny that after graduating from hauling muskrat poop water in metal buckets from a river, we have progressed to skunky piped water from a central supply, to hauling clean water in plastic bottles from the nearest supply point. The river is closer.
What comes through the pipe, we treat appropriately: we flush it.
That surprised me. I always assumed KW’s water came from the Grand River. Apparently only 20% does. link I always assumed that it was much cheaper to get it from the river than to drill wells.
Oh well, you know what they say about assumptions:
I was raised on the Great Plains. The ground water was dreadful. Visiting relatives in Saskatoon Saskatchewan was amazing because they had river water. As a result I have never learned to drink water that wasn’t first converted to coffee.
commieB
You are on the right track. We have a huge water protection area preventing all sorts of things being dropped onto the soil – something of which I highly approve. One of my local buddies is a hydrogeologist who spends quite a bit of time in remediation work.
There are several large boreholes with a huge output fed by copious rain. We have a great deal of groundwater in Ontario, over which everyone fights for the “right to bottle”. We have to have a water softener to make the tap water useable in the shower and sink. Still, there is a serious need for CLR to make the taps presentable. Even after relining the cast iron pipes in our neighbourhood, the water tastes pretty awful.
Crispin in Waterloo but really in Beijing February 1, 2018 at 5:43 pm
“I buy filtered, clean water in 18 litre bottles from a vending machine because it is drinkable.”
Did you ever consider some mischievous person might run their dirty, contaminated finger up into the dispenser spout? Yuk.
Tom in F
Waterloo is thankfully a fairly civilised place. It never crossed my mind. There is a camera, if such a thing happened. Face recognition software is ubiquitous these days. Our cops are talented. They always get their man. Or woman.
Proof that psychiatry is not a science.
A few years back on my first visit to Munich, my German friends impressed upon me how much stricter their tap water standards were than standards for tap water in America. “Germany has the highest standards for water purity in the world!”.
And yet, I noticed that most of them drank expensive bottled water, both at home and especially out at restaurants. When I confronted them with this contradiction, they grinned rather sheepishly and told me that, though the purity of German tap water was a fact, they preferred bottled water for “aesthetic” reasons. “It tastes better”. Drinking bottled water as opposed to tap water seemed to enhance their sense of class status as well!
Well, water bottlers adjust the mineral content for “mouth feel” and taste. We didn’t evolve to drink distilled water, after all.
“Drinking bottled water as opposed to tap water seemed to enhance their sense of class status as well!”
Grab their money and run!
Coca-Cola used to sell a bottled water in the UK called ‘Dasani’.
Sales collapsed when the papers printed a photo of the tap from which it came.
I buy bottled water mainly for making my coffee. My tap water leaves a slight taste in the coffee, otherwise.
The slightly higher salt content (Mg,Ca especially) of tap water makes for a better coffee unless the water is very hard. Just need to get rid of the chlorine before using it by boiling or storing away for a while.
I do use boiled water, if I run out of bottled. This county is highly mineralized, still gold in them thar hills as a consequence.
Whenever I feel like I want to be immoral I Don’t drink water, I start drinking bourbon, whiskey, scotch and gin
Gonna get high, man, I’m gonna get loose
Need me a triple shot of that juice
Gonna get drunk, don’t you have no fear
I want one bourbon, one scotch and one beer
One bourbon, one scotch, one beer
One drink is fine.
Two drinks are perfect.
Three drinks are not enough…
Everything in moderation … including moderation.
A better image would have been a bottle of Evian (naive) water.
I drink tap water in Calgary. It is OK, except in the Spring when it requires much more chlorine.
When I used to travel overseas into the second and third world, I drank only sparkling water. This is because it was reportedly common for restaurants to refill still water bottles with local tap water and put a dab of crazy glue on the cap, so it would open with a credible snap. The local water did not make the natives sick, so “where’s the harm?”
Sparkling water was just too much trouble to fake, so it was safer. Now with Soda Stream, etc., this may not longer be the case.
I wonder how many of the snobby guys in Munich were really drinking local tap water, with a dab of crazy glue chaser, “because it tastes better”. 🙂
The local natives are probably inured to the flora/fauna resident in their water source as well as the dissolved mineral content. Visitors new to the area probably are not hardened against such. Even mineral content changes can have large effects on personal intestinal biologics.
“What’s the harm?”
flatulence, dyspepsia, dysentery, … none fatal, but it will ruin your trip.
But, hey, if you like that sort of thing….
I have never been poisoned by contaminated water, simply by taking the precaution of only drinking carbonated water.
I did get food-poisoned, probably twice – both times in the good old US of A! Once in a very good hotel in Minneapolis, and once in one of the finest restaurants in Washington DC.
The DC episode may have been some seafood allergy to #$%^&* crab cakes, circa 1995. Earlier that day at a World Bank (or similar) conference on Kazakstan, I had been asked to sit on a four-man Pipeline Panel, along with two Kazak cabinet ministers and a SVP from Mobil Oil. The other three guys said nothing of value, probably because of the sensitive political situation, so I decided to try to say something relevant.
I said the possible routes to get oil out of Kazakstan were:
1. The pipeline that was currently under construction, which ran from Mobil’s Tengiz super-giant oilfield to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea – but “you couldn’t have the Russians controlling all the valves” (the Russians had already reneged on that deal ~four times and ended up with much more than they started with). That route also required that tankers navigate the narrow Bosphorus at Istanbul (I still prefer the name Constantinople), which is not the greatest idea from an environmental standpoint. The Russian contingent was quite annoyed by my “valves” comment – there was angry shouting from that cornier of the room. No worries – we resolve our differences with them on the hockey rink. Da! Da! Ca-na-da! Nyet! Nyet! So-vi-et! 🙂
2. Then I said that, hypothetically, one could reverse major pipelines that ran north through Iran. I later found out that Iran was a four-letter word in DC – this became apparent later that afternoon.
3. Finally, I said there was a good but very expensive route from Baku through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean at Ceyhan. I said I liked that route because it avoided the Bosphorus and Russia (more shouting!), even though it was very expensive. The go-ahead on that pipeline was formally announced a few days later.
As I was packing up after the panel, a gentleman asked if he could speak with me. I said sure, and asked who he was with, and he said CIA. I suggested we move away from the microphones, and we talked for a while – he wanted to know who I was, and I give him my card. He asked a few more questions and we parted. He was not particularly friendly. More hockey diplomacy was perhaps in order.
As I moved towards the elevator, another gentleman approached and asked to talk. I said sure, and asked who he was. He said he was the First Undersecretary of the Russian Embassy in DC, to which I replied “Oh, you’re KGB.” He didn’t contradict me, but asked me how more international money could be encouraged to invest in Russian energy ventures. I explained that the oil business typically had thin profit margins, and could not tolerate continued re-negotiations of contracts like the Tengiz pipeline, and unexpected reversals like Shell experienced at Sakhalin. I said we needed Rule of Law and solid contracts, and in the absence of those, investment would dry up (which it already had, due to the White Nights oil company fiasco, etc.). He thanked me and we parted.
It was a different sort of day.
Subsequently, a week before one of my trips through Moscow, a US hotelier named Paul Tatum was assassinated. Tatum was part-owner of the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel in Moscow and had built it into a secure venue for important international and local guests. Tatum’s hotel assets were then expropriated under “standard Russian deal” terms. I later became a business associate of his friend and lawyer, Sam Hammons of Oklahoma. Sam was quoted as saying: “”I think this is a historic moment. Russia is at a crossroads, and the symbol of that crossroads is Paul Tatum’s death.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tatum
http://newsok.com/article/2562663
Western investment in Russian energy ventures has pretty well dried up since then. I used to call it “the full-contact oil business”.
Regards, Allan
I’m all for servicing our precious bodily fluids.
As Group Captain Mandrake might have said: ‘Thank you, Jack.’
“There is also a deeper subconscious force at work here, one that caters to our desire for immortality.”
More ‘Psycho-social-babble’ !
Poppycock.
True immortality is dispensed by the pharmaceutical industry.
Yep, that hopped up pot cures all ills.
A reliable source tells me, that it can also cause you pass out in the bar, even when you’ve only been drinking for a mere 8 hours straight.
Pick your poison.
Sounds like a description of Progressives. Now the claim starts to make sense.
Of course, this is a fairly transparent campaign by greens to attack bottled water, because plastic bottles.
What is described is called “vain”. Vanity has no political persuasion, but it does have company with sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust, wrath and envy.
…‘Bottled water sales fueled by desire for immortality’…
I’d always thought that it was because most people are like sheep, and so long as there’s a concensus that you should drink bottled water, supported by lots of authority figures who say that they know what they are talking about, then a select few can get rich selling a completely useless product to the people at large for a lot of money.
I wonder why Peter Gleick didn’t think of that?
Those who believe in immortality will always be disappointed.
In the end. And not until the end….
In the game of life, nobody gets out alive.
As a West Coast Canadian I never saw bottled water (except expensive, trendy Perrier) until I crossed into Spain in the summer of 1984. Had to change trains from the beautiful, clean French train to the scruffy, standing room only Spanish train at the border. It was very early August, very hot and no shade on the platform. Fortunately I spotted a man selling litre-size bottles of water and purchased one. Without it I might have died of dehydration on the long, milk-run journey to Portugal. I don’t know if there was any water on the train but the toilets were all plugged so I wouldn’t have chanced it anyway. So bottled water may have actually saved my life. In Portugal wine was cheaper than bottled water and you can guess which my drink of choice became.
As usual, the major assumption of this study is pure nonsense – attempting to live a healthy life by drinking bottled water does NOT equate to anything having to do with desires for immortality.
I grew up on rain or borewater and never got crook from either unfiltered.
my present bore is heavy in iron and ?what else is a mystery as well as 2kppm salt so its drinkable in small volume or desperation only. my tank water is as it ends up in the tank- leaves mud and birdpoop as “exciting” additions. i dont have any problems but i do tend to boil water i drink because…coffee/tea needs that;-)
ive probably only ever bought a dozen bottled waters for the dogs bowls while travelling
“There is also a deeper subconscious force at work here, one that caters to our desire for immortality.”
No Stephanie. A whole bunch of Greenies kept drumming into a few generations that they had polluted the planet so much it was very easy for supply to rush in and meet that demand. The same can be said of the oxymoron of organic food, the rise of vegetarianism and veganism plus all those plastic containers of vitamins and so called natural remedies and supplements now lining the supermarket shelves. You plug a religious cult long enough and often enough and there will be followers observing the rituals and social mores observing the penance that goes hand in glove with it all and absolution in the afterlife when they’ve all had their Soylent Green.
It’s just a typical mass reaction as the new mantra hits home (albeit with some initial veracity under the circumstances) but it always leads to an emotional overreaction and people going overboard long after the initial threat has passed- https://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/Nature_Rebounds.pdf
If you want to curb bottled water, etc then first you have to stop frightening school kiddies about how they’ve drastically polluted their environment to begin with. They’ll grow up thinking they’ll explode or a polar bear will fall on their head if it doesn’t come officially labelled Gaia approved for their bodily shrine.
“The same can be said of the oxymoron of organic food, the rise of vegetarianism and veganism plus all those plastic containers of vitamins and so called natural remedies and supplements now lining the supermarket shelves. You plug a religious cult long enough and often enough and there will be followers observing the rituals and social mores observing the penance that goes hand in glove with it all and absolution in the afterlife when they’ve all had their Soylent Green.”
Oh dear! Doesn’t that translate to you will only eat what I deem you should eat, and consume the medicines I deem appropriate? Them who exercise choice are religious and them handing out the orders aren’t?
I don’t care what expensive water or gobbledegook people want to stick down their throats as tap water and a healthy array of cooked and fresh tucker will do me just fine for all the sustenance I need. Looking around it seems the problem’s too much of it rather than any shortcoming requiring special additives. Just saying if the Greenies have a problem with bottled water, reap what you sow with your environmental hysterics.
“a healthy array of cooked and fresh tucker will do me just fine for all the sustenance I need. Looking around it seems the problem’s too much of it rather than any shortcoming requiring special additives.”
I think your problem’s being unable to see that individual’s needs are different to yours. Example: I suffer from chronic osteoarthritis, a condition that causes constant though varying levels of pain. It’s a degenerative disease, so with time it gets worse. Note that I’m not seeking sympathy here; it just happens to be a fact for me and many, many people on this planet.\
Conventional medicine provides a partial solution, a class of drugs called NSAIDs. They are quite effective, but have a range of unwanted side effects: stomach bleeding, kidney damage… Steroidal anti-inflammatories OTOH while more effective at pain relief knock out the auto-immune system and cause fluid accumulation in body tissue. If like me you have congestive heart failure then you are combating excessive fluid accumulation to avoid dying.
Alternatively, curcumin[1], an extract of turmeric (responsible for the yellow colour of many Indian curries) is an anti-inflammatory at least as effective as NSAIDs. And yes, even though it’s one of the off-the-supermarket-shelf substances you excoriate because you don’t need it, it has several side-effects. It suppresses a number of cancers, reduces the preconditions for type 2 diabetes and healthy tissue necrosis adjacent to burns. Curcumin has been in use in India for several thousand years and your assertion that its recent appearance on Western supermarket shelves is due to some greenie conspiracy is, to say the least, hilarious.
[1] Curcumin is but one example of what are called CAM. Complementary and alternative medicines. Their rise is actually due to the almost complete failure of conventional medicine to effectively treat chronic disease. CAMs are rarely used in the West to treat acute problems. Some 80 percent of the world’s population are too poor to afford anything else. But as you say, you don’t care what other people need.
The mythical spring of eternal life or the scientific practice of Planned Parenthood and recycled-child. A clear and progressive minority seem to prefer the latter.
How exactly do they know what our subconscious wants? And how do they they then know what appeals to it?
Madison Avenue executives have figured it out. And with the explosion of social media, the public has been more than willing to supply the manipulators with information about everything…for free!
True, not everybody behaves exactly the same way, but just as I will never know the exact trajectory of any specific air molecule, that’s not important as long as I can measure which way the wind is blowing.
Three of the greatest advancements in technology for humans that have extended our average longevity were (1) agriculture, (2) separating domestic sewage from drinking water (we have had to learn that one more than several times) and (3) vaccines. Even though this study claims people, or at least the companies want people to, choose bottle water for immortality that doesn’t explain why there are major movements attacking “modern” agriculture and vaccines.
Even here in Canada there are thousands of places with no available clean potable water, outdoor areas, campgrounds, even workplaces with no potable water, so we buy bottled water to take with us. The municipalities with good potable water tell us to keep a decent supply of bottled water on hand just in case of potable water quality or supply problems.
Maybe I’m just old school, but when I went to work (in the outdoors) I would bring a container full of enough water to get me thru the day, then next day I would refill the same container with water.
I left no litter, and didn’t have to pay the 2,000% premium for store bought water, and it was just as wet.
with the advent of cheap and simple to operate UV LED’s we are due to enter a new era of good water but this time distributed through the population and free of chlorination which unfortunately has bad press, I struggle to taste it.
Unfortunately, UV just creates a different bunch of novel organic molecules, most with as yet unknown effect. Better methinks to reduce the organic matter content to the point where sterilisation is unnecessary. YMMV of course. Feel free to drink water with bacteria dead, or alive and Bondi cigars. I’ll go with straight H2O.
FWIW the water I collect costs considerably less than the municipal water I provide my tenants in town.
i’ve been using a Steripen for backcountry water since it came out as a product about15 years ago. It renders the little critters sterile, it doesn’t kill them outright such as happens with chemical oxidation methods. Sterilization is what I assume is happening with any UV water treatment. That doesn’t bother me a bit. In California at least there is a strict limit on “organic matter” too. Our private well company (old well) fails this limit on a regular basis and we are forced to colorinate our wonderful Pleistocene fossil water .
UV
I appreciate being able to buy a bottle of water that is acceptable for taste, mineral content, clarity, and even smell and viscosity. I well remember in the 60’s and 70’s sampling various town and rural waters while on road and bicycle trips. You balanced your thirst against your sensibilities.
“You balanced your thirst against your sensibilities.”
For me it was more than thirst against sensibilities when travelling in Bali back in those days. I had been warned to always eat chilies with raw food and on one occasion there weren’t any. I ended up with the worst case of dysentery I’ve ever suffered. The natives gave me a plantain (type of banana) studded with live head-lice to eat. It was a prolonged struggle to overcome my revulsion, and cause for considerable mirth among the locals, but I eventually succeeded and within a remarkably short time my dysentery was cured.
And for me Baja – no non-bottled anything and no fresh vegetables. Sometimes it’s hard to decline really well intentioned offerings, I suffered every time I went against my misgivings.
It seems that Capetown is facing a dire water situation in the near future, unless the water gods bring rain. …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENoOZWNKQJo
A lot of products nowadays capitalize on the idea of aligning virtue with good health.
“Honest” tea, “Ethos” water at Starbucks, etc.
We threw out God and we have recreated “virtue.” We are simply repeating the act of denying and recreating God as happened at Babel.
This makes these virtuous / responsible / ethical appeals work.