Tag Archives: alkaline

Just what is blk water, and should you drink it?

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Christmas is almost here! Are you ready yet? Are you fed up with people asking if you’re ready yet? Have you worked out what to buy for Great-uncle Nigel, who says he neither needs nor wants anything? Always a tricky scenario, that. Consumables are often a safe fallback position. They don’t clutter up the house, and who doesn’t enjoy a nice box of luxury biscuits, or chocolates, or a bottle of champagne, or spirts, or a case of blk water.

Wait, what?

Yes, this mysterious product turned up in my feed a few weeks ago. It’s water (well, so they say), but it’s black. Actually black. Not just black because the bottle’s black, black because the liquid inside it is… black.

It’s black water.

A bit like… cola. Only blacker, and not fizzy, or sweet, or with any discernable flavour other than water.

It raises many questions, doesn’t it? Let’s start with why. Obviously it’s a great marketing gimmick. It definitely looks different. It also comes with a number of interesting claims. The suppliers claim it contains “no nasties” and “only 2 ingredients”, namely spring water and “Fulvic Minerals” (sic). (Hang on, I hear you say, if it’s minerals, plural, surely that’s already more than two ingredients? Oh, but that’s only the start. Stay with me.)

It claims to “balance pH levels” and help “to regulate our highly acidic diets”. Yes, well, I think I’ve covered that before. Absolutely nothing you drink, or eat, does anything to the pH in any part of your body except, possibly, your urine – where you might see a small difference under some circumstances (but even if you do it doesn’t tell you anything significant about the impact of your diet on your long-term health). And bear in mind that a few minutes after you drink any kind of alkaline water it mixes with stomach acid which has a pH of around 2. Honestly, none of that alkaline “goodness” makes it past your pyloric sphincter.

Finally, blk water apparently “replenishes electrolytes”. Hm. Electrolytes are important in the body. They’re ionic species, which means they can conduct electricity. Your muscles and neurons rely on electrical activity, so they are quite important. Like, life or death important. But because of that our bodies are quite good at regulating them, most of the time. If you run marathons in deserts, or get struck down with a nasty case of food poisoning, or have some kind of serious health condition (you’d know about it) you might need to think about electrolytes, but otherwise most of us get what we need from the food and drink we consume normally every day.

Besides which, didn’t they say “only 2 ingredients”? The most common electrolytes in the body are sodium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, hydrogen phosphate and hydrogen carbonate. Most spring waters do contain some, if not all, of these, in greater or smaller amounts, but it’s not going to be enough to effectively “replenish” any of them. If, say, you are running marathons in the desert, the advice is actually to keep a careful eye on your water intake because drinking too much water can dangerously lower your sodium levels. Yes, there are sports drinks that are specifically designed to help with this, but they taste of salt and sugar and/or flavourings which have been added in a desperate attempt to cover up the salty taste. This is apparently not the case with blk water which, to repeat myself, contains “only 2 ingredients”.

And, according to the blk website the drink contains “0 mg of sodium per 500ml” so… yeah.

Speaking of ingredients, what about those so-called fulvic minerals? Maybe they’re the source of those all-important electrolytes (but not sodium)? And maybe they’re magically tasteless, too?

And perhaps, like other magical objects and substances, they don’t actually exist – as geologist @geolizzy told me on Twitter when I asked.

It’s not looking good for blk water (£47.99 for a case of 24 bottles) at this point. But hang on. Perhaps when they said fulvic minerals, what they meant was fulvic acid – which is a thing, or possibly several things – in a the presence of oh, say, some bicarbonate (*cough* 2 ingredients *cough*).

That could push the pH up to the stated 8-9, and didn’t we learn in school that:
acid + alkali –> salt + water
and maybe, if we’re being generous, we could call the salts of fulvic acids minerals? It’s a bit shaky but… all right.

So what are fulvic acids?

That’s an interesting question. I had never heard of fulvic acids. They do, as it turns out, have a Wikipedia page (Wikipedia is usually very reliable for chemical information, since no one has yet been very interested in spoofing chemical pages to claim things like hydrochloric acid is extracted from the urine of pregnant unicorns) but the information wasn’t particularly enlightening. The page did inform me that fulvic acids are “components of the humus” (in soil) and are  “similar to humic acids, with differences being the carbon and oxygen contents, acidity, degree of polymerization, molecular weight, and color.” The Twitter hive-mind, as you can see, was sending me down the same path…

A typical example of a humic acid.

Next stop, humic acids. Now we’re getting somewhere. These are big molecules with several functional groups. The chemists out there will observe that, yes, they contain several carboxylic acid groups (the COOH / HOOC ones you can see in the example) so, yes, it makes sense they’d behave as acids.

“No nasties”, blk said. “Pure” they said. When you hear those sorts of things, do you imagine something like this is in your drink? Especially one that, let’s be clear, is a component of soil?

Oh, hang on, I should’ve checked the “blk explained” page on the blk water website. There’s a heading which actually says “what are Fulvic Minerals”, let’s see now…

“Fulvic minerals are plant matter derived from millions of years ago that have combined with fulvic acid forming rare fulvic mineral deposits. They deliver some of the most powerful electrolytes in the world.”

“Fulvic minerals contain 77 other trace minerals, most of which have an influence on the healthiness of our body. They are very high in alkaline and when sourced from the ground contain a pH of 9.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not totally convinced. I mean, as @geolizzy says in her tweet here (excuse the minor typo, she means humic, not humid),  it sounds a bit like… water contaminated with hydrocarbon deposits?

Yummy.

And, by the way, the phrase “very high in alkaline” is utterly meaningless. Substances are alkaline, or they contain substances which are alkaline. “Alkaline” is not a thing in itself. This is like saying my tea is high in hot when sourced from the teapot.

There’s one more thing to add. So far this might sound a bit weird but… probably safe, right? What could be more wholesome than a bit of soil? Didn’t your granny tell you to eat a pinch of soil to boost your immune system, or something? At worst it’s harmless, right?

Tap water is chlorine-treated to keep it free of nasty bacteria.

Maybe. But then again… water is often treated with chlorine compounds to keep it bacteria-free. Now, blk water is supposedly spring water, which isn’t usually treated. But hypothetically, let’s consider what happens when humic acids, or fulvic acids, or whatever we’re calling them, come into contact with chlorine-treated water.

Oh dear. It seems that dihaloacetonitriles are formed. (See also this paper.) This is a group of substances (possibly the best known one is dichloroacetonitrile) which are variously toxic and mutagenic. Let’s hope that spring water is totally unchlorinated, 100% “we really got it from out of a rock” spring water, then.

To sum up: it is black, and that’s kind of weird and a fun talking point – although if you like the idea of a black drink you can always drink cola. It doesn’t balance your pH levels – nothing does. I don’t believe it replenishes electrolyte levels either – how can it when it doesn’t contain sodium? – and I’m dubious about the “2 ingredients” claim (could you tell?). And the oh-so-healthy-sounding fulvic minerals are most likely due to contamination from coal deposits.

All in all, whilst it might not be quite such a conversation piece, I think it would be better to get Great-uncle Nigel a nice box of chocolates this year.

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Absurd alkaline ideas – history, horror and jail time

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I’ve written about the absurdity of alkaline diets before, and found myself embroiled in more than one argument about the idea.

To sum up quickly, it’s the notion that our bodies are somehow “acidic”, and if only we could make them “alkaline” all our health problems – cancer included – would disappear. The way you make your body “alkaline” is, mainly, by eating lots of vegetables and some fruits (particularly citrus fruits – yes, I know, I know).

The eating fruit and vegetables bit aside (they’re good for you, you should eat them), it’s all patent nonsense. Our bodies aren’t acidic – well, other than where they’re supposed to be acidic (like our stomachs) – and absolutely nothing we eat or drink can have any sort of effect on blood pH, which is kept firmly between 7.35-7.45 by (mainly) our lungs and kidneys. And if your kidneys or lungs are failing, you need something a little stronger in terms of medical intervention than a slice of lemon.

But who first came up with this crazy idea?

Claude Bernard carried out experiments on rabbits.

Actually, we can probably blame a nineteenth century French biologist and physiologist, Claude Bernard, for kicking the whole thing off, when he noticed that if he changed the diet of rabbits from largely plant-based to largely animal-based (i.e. from herbivorous to carnivorous) their urine became more acidic.

This observation, followed by a lot of speculation by nutritionists and some really quite impressively dodgy leaps of reasoning (by others, I should stress – not Bernard himself), has lead us to where we are now: umpty-million websites and books telling anyone who will listen that humans need to cut out all animal products to avoid becoming “acidic” and thus ill.

Bernard’s rabbits were, it seems, quite hungry when he got them – quite possibly they hadn’t been fed – and he immediately gave them boiled beef and nothing else. Meat contains the amino acids cysteine and methionine, both of which can produce acid when they’re metabolised (something Bernard didn’t know at the time). The rabbits excreted this in their urine, which probably explains why it became acidic.

Now, many of you will have noticed several problems here. Firstly, rabbits are herbivores by nature (they do not usually eat meat in the wild). Humans aren’t herbivores. Humans are omnivores, and we have quite different digestive processes as a result. It’s not reasonable to extrapolate from rabbits to humans when it comes to diet. Plus, even the most ardent meat-lover probably doesn’t only eat boiled beef – at the very least people usually squeeze in a battered onion ring or a bit of coleslaw along the way. Most critically of all, urine pH has no direct relationship with blood pH. It tells us nothing about the pH of “the body” (whatever we understand that to mean).

The notion that a plant-based diet is somehow “alkaline” should really have stayed in the 19th century where it belonged, and at the very least not limped its way out of the twentieth. Unfortunately, somewhere in the early 2000s, a man called Robert O Young got hold of the idea and ran with it.

Young’s books – which are still available for sale at the time of writing – describe him as “PhD”, even though he has no accredited qualification.

Boy, did he run with it. In 2002 he published a book called The pH Miracle, followed by The pH Miracle for Diabetes (2004), The pH Miracle for Weight Loss (2005) and The pH Miracle Revised (2010).

All of these books describe him either as “Dr Robert O Young” or refer to him as “PhD”. But he has neither a medical qualification nor a PhD, other than one he bought from a diploma mill – a business that offers degrees for money.

The books all talk about “an alkaline environment” and state that so-called acidic foods and drinks (coffee, tea, dried fruit, anything made with yeast, meat and dairy, amongst other foodstuffs) should be avoided if not entirely eliminated.

Anyone paying attention will quickly note that an “alkaline” diet is basically a very restrictive vegan diet. Most carbohydrate-based foods are restricted, and lots of fruits and nuts fall into the “moderately” and “mildly” acidic categories. Whilst a vegan diet can be extremely healthy, vegans do need to be careful that they get the nutrients they need. Restricting nuts, pulses, rice and grains as well as removing meat and dairy could, potentially, lead to nutritional deficiencies.

Young also believes in something called pleomorphism, which is a whole other level of bonkers. Essentially, he thinks that viruses and bacteria aren’t the cause of illnesses – rather, the things we think are viruses and bacteria are actually our own cells which have changed in response to our “acidic environments”. In Young’s mind, we are making ourselves sick – there is one illness (acidosis) and one cure (his alkaline diet).

It’s bad enough that he’s asserting such tosh and being taken seriously by quite a lot of people. It’s even worse that he has been treating patients at his ranch in California, claiming that he could “cure” them of anything and everything, including cancer.

One of his treatments involved intravenous injections of solutions of sodium hydrogen carbonate, otherwise known as sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. This common cookery ingredient does produce an alkaline solution (about pH 8.5) when dissolved in water, but remember when I said blood pH was hard to shift?

Screenshot from a BBC article, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38650739

Well, it is, and for good reason. If blood pH moves above the range of 7.35-7.45 it causes a condition called alkalosis. This can result in low blood potassium which in turn leads to muscle weakness, pain, and muscle cramps and spasms. It can also cause low blood calcium, which can ultimately result in a type of seizure. Putting an alkaline solution directly into somone’s blood is genuinely dangerous.

And this is before we even start to consider the fact that someone who was not a medical professional was recommending, and even administering, intravenous drips. Which, by the way, he was reportedly charging his patients $550 a pop to receive.

Young came to the attention of the authorities several times, but always managed to wriggle out of trouble. That is, until 2014, when he was arrested and charged with practising medicine without a license and fraud. In February last year, he was found guilty, but a hung jury caused complications when they voted 11-1 to convict on the two medical charges, but deadlocked 8-4 on fraud charges.

Finally, at the end of June 2017, he was sentenced. He was given three years, eight months in custody, but due to the time he’s already spent in custody and under house arrest, he’s likely to actually serve five months in jail.

He admitted that he illegally treated patients at his luxury Valley Center ranch without any medical or scientific training. Perhaps best of all, he was also made to publicly declare that he is not microbiologist, hematologist, medical doctor or trained scientist, and that he has no post-highschool educational degrees from any accredited school.

Prosecuting Deputy District Attorney Gina Darvas called Young the “Wizard of pHraud”, which is rather apt. Perhaps the titles on his books could be edited to read “Robert O Young, pHraud”?

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Alkaline water: if you like it, why not make your own?

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Me* reading the comments section on the Amazing Alkaline Lemons post (*not actually me)

Alkaline water seems to be a trend at the moment. Not quite so much in the UK, yet, but more so in the US where it appears you can buy nicely-packaged bottles with the numbers like 8 and 9.5 printed in large, blue letters on their sides.

It’s rather inexplicable, because drinking slightly alkaline water does literally NOTHING for your health. You have a stomach full of approximately 1 M hydrochloric acid (and some other stuff) which has an acidic pH of somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5. This is entirely natural and normal – it’s there to kill any bugs that might be present in your food.

Chugging expensive water with an alkaline pH of around 9 will neutralise a bit of that stomach acid (bringing the pH closer to a neutral value of 7), and that’s all it will do. A stronger effect could be achieved with an antacid tablet (why isn’t it antiacid? I’ve never understood that) costing around 5p. Either way, the effect is temporary: your stomach wall contains special cells which secrete hydrochloric acid. All you’re doing by drinking or eating alkaline substances is keeping them busy.

(By the way, I’m not recommending popping antacids like sweeties – it could make you ill with something called milk-alkali syndrome, which can lead to kidney failure.)

Recently, a video did the rounds of a woman testing various bottled waters, declaring the ones with slightly acidic pHs to be “trash” and expressing surprise that several brands, including Evian, were pH neutral. The horror. (For anyone unsure, we EXPECT water to have a neutral pH.)

Such tests are ridiculous for lots of reasons, not least because she had tiny amounts of water in little iddy-biddy cups. Who knows how long they’d been sitting around, but if it was any length of time they could well have absorbed some atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is very soluble, and it forms carbonic acid when it dissolves in water which, yes, would lower the pH.

Anyway, there’s absolutely nothing harmful about drinking water containing traces of acid. It doesn’t mean the water is bad. In fact, if you use an ion exchange filter (as found in, say, Brita filter jugs) it actually replaces calcium ions in the water with hydrogen ions. For any non-chemists reading this: calcium ions are the little sods that cause your kettle to become covered in white scale (I’m simplifying a bit). Hydrogen ions make things acidic. In short, less calcium ions means less descaling, but the slight increase in hydrogen ions means a lower pH.

So, filtered water from such jugs tends to be slightly acidic. Brita don’t advertise this fact heavily, funnily enough, but it’s true. As it happens, I own such a filter, because I live in an area where the water is so hard you can practically use it to write on blackboards. After I bought my third kettle, second coffee machine and bazillionth bottle of descaler, I decided it would be cheaper to use filtered water.

I also have universal indicator strips, because the internet is awesome (when I was a kid you couldn’t, easily, get this stuff without buying a full chemistry set or, ahem, knowing someone who knew someone – now three clicks and it’s yours in under 48 hours).

The pH of water that’s been through a (modern) ion-exchange filter tends to be slightly acidic.

The water in the glass was filtered using my Brita water filter and tested immediately. You can see it has a pH of about 5. The water straight from the tap, for reference, has a pH of about 7 (see the image below, left-hand glass).

The woman in the YouTube video would be throwing her Brita in the trash right now and jumping up and down on it.

So, alkaline water is pretty pointless from a health point of view (and don’t even start on the whole alkaline diet thing) but, what if you LIKE it?

Stranger things have happened. People acquire tastes for things. I’m happy to accept that some people might actually like the taste of water with a slightly alkaline pH. And if that’s you, do you need to spend many pounds/dollars/insert-currency-of-choice-here on expensive bottled water with an alkaline pH?

Even more outlandishly, is it worth spending £1799.00 on an “AlkaViva Vesta H2 Water Ionizer” to produce water with a pH of 9.5? (This gizmo also claims to somehow put “molecular hydrogen” into your water, and I suppose it might, but only very temporarily: unlike carbon dioxide, hydrogen is very insoluble. Also, I’m a bit worried that machine might explode.)

Fear not, I am here to save your pennies! You do not need to buy special bottled water, and you DEFINITELY don’t need a machine costing £1.8k (I mean, really?) No, all you need is a tub of….

… baking soda!

Yep, good old sodium bicarbonate, also known as sodium hydrogencarbonate, bicarb, or NaHCO3. You can buy a 200 g tub for a pound or so, and that will make you litres and litres and litres of alkaline water. Best of all, it’s MADE for baking, so you know it’s food grade and therefore safe to eat (within reason, don’t eat the entire tub in one go).

All you need to do is add about a quarter of a teaspoon of aforementioned baking soda to a large glass of water and stir. It dissolves fairly easily. And that’s it – alkaline water for pennies!

Me* unconvinced by the flavour of alkaline water (*actually me).

Fair warning, if you drink a lot of this it might give you a bit of gas: once the bicarb hits your stomach acid it will react to form carbon dioxide – but it’s unlikely to be worse than drinking a fizzy drink. It also contains sodium, so if you’ve been told to watch your sodium intake, don’t do this.

If I had fewer scruples I’d set up shop selling “dehydrated alkaline water, just add water”.

Sigh. I’ll never be rich.

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Words of woo: what does ‘alkalise’ mean?

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220px-Marketvegetables

‘alkaline’ diets usually revolve around eating lots of fruit and vegetables – no bad thing, but it won’t change your body’s pH

If you hang around in the unscientific chunks of the internet for any length of time, as I find myself doing from time to time, you start to come across certain words that get used over and over. They are usually words that sound very sciency, and they’re being used to make things sound legitimate when, if we’re honest, they’re really not.

One such word is ‘alkalise’ (or ‘alkalize’). I’ve met it often ever since I wrote my post ‘Amazing alkaline lemons?‘. So, what does this word mean?

Good question. Google it, and at least the first three pages of links are about diets and how to ‘alkalise your body’ featuring such pithy lines as:

“It’s not really a diet… it’s a way of eating” (is there a difference?)
“Alkalise or live a life of misery” (gosh)
“Alkalise or die” (blimey)
“Alkaline water” (apparently this is a thing)
“Why it’s important to alkalise your water” (using our overpriced products)

In fact, I had to click through several pages of Google links before I even got to something that was simply a definition. (I’m aware that Google personalises its search results, so if you try this yourself you might have a different experience.) Certainly, there are no legitimate chemistry, biochemistry – or anything else like that – articles in sight.

Hunt specifically for a definition and you get ‘turn basic and less acidic; “the solution alkalized”‘ (The Free Dictionary), ‘to make or become alkaline.‘ (Dictionary.com) and, simply, ‘to make alkaline’ (Collins).

Universal_indicator_paper

pH 7 is neutral, more than 7 is basic

The first of these is interesting, because it refers to ‘basic’. Now, as I’ve explained in another post, bases and alkalis are not quite the same thing. In chemistry a base is, in simple terms, anything that can neutralise an acid. Alkalis, on the other hand, are a small subset of this group of compounds: specifically the soluble, basic, ionic salts of alkali metals or alkaline earth metals.

Since there are only six alkali metals (only five that are stable) and only six alkaline earth metals (the last of which is radium – probably best you steer clear of radium compounds) there are a rather limited number of alkalis, namely: lithium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, rubidium hydroxide, caesium hydroxide, beryllium hydroxide, magnesium hydroxide, calcium hydroxide, strontium hydroxide, barium hydroxide and radium hydroxide. There you go. That’s it. That’s all of them. (Okay, yes, under the ‘soluble in water’ definition we could also include ammonium hydroxide, formed by dissolving the base, ammonia, in water – that opens up a few more.)

This, you see, is why real chemists tend not to use the term ‘alkalise’ very often. Because, unless the thing you’re starting with does actually form one of these hydroxides (there are some examples, mostly involving construction materials), it’s a little bit lead-into-gold-y, and chemists hate that. The whole not changing one element into another thing (barring nuclear reactions, obviously) is quite fundamental to chemistry. That’s why your chemistry teacher spent hours forcing you to balance equations at school.

No, the relevant chemistry word is ‘basify‘. This is such a little-known word that even my spell checker complains, but it’s just the opposite of the slightly better-known ‘acidify’ – in other words, basify means to raise the pH of something by adding something basic to it. Google ‘basify’ and you get a very different result to that from ‘alkalise’. The first several links are dictionary definitions and grammar references, and after that it quickly gets into proper chemistry (although I did spot one that said ‘how to basify your urine’ – sigh).

What does all this mean? Well, if you see someone using the word “alkalising” it should raise red flags. I’d suggest that unless they’re about to go on to discuss cement (calcium hydroxide is an important ingredient in construction materials) cocoa production or, possibly, certain paint pigments, then you can probably write off the next few things they say as total nonsense. If they’re not discussing one of the above topics, the chances are good that what they actually know about chemistry could safely fit on the back of a postage stamp, with space to spare, so nod, smile and make your escape.

For the record, you absolutely don’t need to alkalise your diet. Or your urine*. Really. You don’t.

And please don’t waste your money on alkaline water.

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—

Lemon

There’s no good evidence that drinking lemon juice has a significant impact on urine pH.

* In the event that you actually have problematically acidic urine, perhaps due to some medical condition, there are proven treatments that will neutralise it (i.e. take it to around pH 7, which is the pH urine ought to be, roughly). In particular, sodium citrate powder can be dissolved in water to form a drinkable solution. Of course, if this is due to an infection you should see a doctor: you might need antibiotics – urinary tract infections can turn nasty. Yes, I am aware that the salt of the (citric) acid in lemons is sodium citrate, however there is no good evidence that drinking lemon juice actually raises urine pH by a significant amount. And yes, I’m also aware that dietary intake of citrate is known to inhibit the formation of calcium oxalate and calcium phosphate kidney stones, but that’s a whole other thing. If you have kidney stones there are a number of dietary considerations to make, not least of which might be to cut down on your consumption of certain fruits and vegetables such as strawberries and spinach (and ironically, if you look at some of the – entirely unscientific – lists of acid-forming and alkali-forming foods these are almost always on the alkaline side).

Link

It's pure something all right...

It’s pure something all right…

Recently a friend sent me a link to this page about the ‘Hexagon H2O‘ water purification system. He knew I’d love it, and I did. Not, however, for the reasons the company supplying it would presumably hope. The ‘science’ is so ludicrous, it’s hard to believe anyone would even begin to take it seriously. Sadly, this product (which, spoiler alert, is a massive scam) seems to have made quite a bit of money by scattering vaguely sciencey-sounding terms around like confetti and sucking in anyone whose chemistry and physics knowledge is, shall we say, less than detailed.

That said, it is easy to forget about water when we talk about chemistry, since we’re usually more interested in what’s in the water than the water itself. It’s actually pretty important, especially when it comes to pH. So in the spirit of finding some good good in the bad, let’s use some of their claims to have a look at the chemistry.

We begin with the very first sentence on the very first page: “With the Hexagon Alkaline Hydrogen Water Filtration System, you can transform normal tap water into hydrogen-rich alkaline water.”

First of all, what is water? Water is H2O (they did get that mostly right, apart from the times they write it as H2O). What does this familiar formula mean? It means that in pure water there are two hydrogen atoms for every one oxygen atom. These atoms are strongly bonded together, and generally like to stay that way. That said, a very small number of those bonds do break at room temperature, like this:

H2O → H+ + OH–

On the right of the arrow we have hydrogen ions (H+, actually, technically, H3O+) and hydroxide ions (OH–).  At room temperature, there are very roughly 600000000 water molecules for every hydrogen ion in pure water. In other words, hardly any hydrogen (and hydroxide) ions at all. This is because every time a water molecule breaks up into hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions, they just as quickly recombine to form water again.

Now this is for pure water, and pure water has a pH of 7. The reason it has a pH of 7 is because it has this ratio of hydrogen (and hydroxide) ions to water molecules. A solution with a different pH will have a different ratio. If it’s acidic, it has more hydrogen ions. If it’s alkaline, fewer. Assuming room temperature (I keep saying this because pH goes down ever so slightly at higher temperatures, although this does not exactly mean the water becomes more acidic) if the pH is not 7, the water is not pure.

By pure, I mean containing H2O only, and nothing else. It’s very difficult to get a completely pure sample of H2O, because in a single gram of water there are about 30000000000000000000000 molecules. If we’re talking about pure in the, er, purest sense, that means there can’t be even one other molecule or ion in there, and that’s highly unlikely. Not least because gases in the air dissolve in water. Still, you see my point. Pure water has a pH of 7 (at room temperature), and is neither acidic nor alkaline. End of story.

So, back to “hydrogen-rich, alkaline water”. ‘Hydrogen-rich’ could either mean it contains dissolved H2 gas (which is highly unlikely, since it’s pretty insoluble) or that it contains lots of H+ ions. Which would make the water acidic. Which would mean it can’t also be alkaline.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there is no way this statement can be correct.

It gets worse from there. The site helpfully ‘explains’ some terms, and the first of these is ‘alkaline’. Apparently, this is “how water should be”. Well, no. See above. Indeed, if the water were significantly alkaline it would be a bit of a problem. It would taste bitter (yuck), probably cause stomach trouble over time and might even irritate your skin. In fact, this is quite likely, since later on they claim their water has a pH between 8 and 10. 10 is really quite high; hand soap and indigestion remedies have a pHs of about 10.

The first page also says: “The body has natural alkaline buffers against excessive acidity so it can maintain blood pH at the optimum level. However, over-acidity can often occur after a prolonged period of bad eating and stress.” Now, I’ve been over this at length. Nothing you eat or drink can change your blood’s pH, which is tightly controlled at about 7.4. There is also no such thing as an ‘alkaline buffer’ (see my recent post on buffers). A very unhealthy diet will certainly have a negative impact on your health over time, for example it might have an effect on bone density. However drinking an alkaline solution is really not the way to combat that. Sadly, the answer is the usual boring stuff about eating more vegetables and perhaps cutting back a bit on meat and dairy. If you just drink an alkaline solution, your stomach acid will simply neutralise it.

We go on, “[by drinking Hexagon water] you are simply helping your natural alkaline buffers to restore pH balance and to reduce health-robbing acid in your body“. Hm. Acid is actually quite important in the body. Your stomach contains hydrochloric acid, which you need to digest food and to protect you from nasty bugs. So describing acid as health-robbing is quite misleading (although I am going to link to this article again, which is worth a read if you’re genuinely interested in actual science).

And then we get to: “Water from the Hexagon has smaller molecular clusters than normal water. This means that it can permeate the body’s cell membranes more rapidly and more efficiently to provide nutrients.”  Water molecules do form clusters, but they’re really not well understood. In fact, they’re an important area of research right now (although if you look them up you need to be careful to distinguish between genuine researchers and genuine quacks, of which there are many). How this company can claim they know anything at all about the size of the water clusters in the water their product produces is beyond me. Also, water clusters aren’t stable – the hydrogen bonds holding them together constantly break and reform, so there’s no way it can make any difference to how easily water permeates cell membranes.

It gets worse from there, with talk of “positive energy” and, my favourite, “Infus[ing] energy into water through natural spiralling movement”.

The whole thing is pure (at least something is pure) nonsense. Even Wikipedia says so. I suppose there will always be people willing to hand over their hard-earned cash for such things, but if you’ve got this far at least you won’t be one of them. Pass it on.