Cool clear water

I was thinking a couple of days ago that it'd been a while since I dealt with a new crazy alt-med cure, and that maybe the woo-woos had run out of ideas.

Optimism, sometimes, is a losing proposition.

As it so often happens, I found out how wrong I was at the hands of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  She sent me a link with the text, "I guess this is kind of homeopathic Nirvana, isn't it?  As dilute as you can possibly get."  And the link took me to a site that claims that all human diseases can be cured...

... by drinking distilled water.

Distilled water, as I probably don't need to mention, is water that has been put through the process of steam distillation to remove any trace impurities.  It's useful in sensitive medical and scientific applications where even small amounts of dissolved minerals might interfere with the results.

What these people are claiming, though, is that ordinary tap water isn't... watery enough, or something.  Here are a couple of quotes from the site, so you can get the flavor of it:

When one drinks impure, dirty water, the body acts as a filter, trapping a percentage of the solids suspended in the water.  A filter eventually becomes clogged and useless – fit only to be thrown away. The human body might well face the same fate. 

But the basic point – that only distilled water avoids mineral buildups in the body – is an inarguable one.  The deposits, which build up in a teakettle from repeated use, are traces of minerals left behind as the water evaporates.  Distilled water leaves no such traces – in a teakettle or in the human body.  It is true that in most hospitals distilled water is used for newborn infants; distilled water is prescribed for heart patients in many cardiac wards.  And it is true that kidney stones and other mineral-like buildups in the body are much more common in the areas where the drinking water has high levels in inorganic minerals – and distilled water has none of those at all.

Thinking that minerals build up in the body the same way boiler scale forms on a teakettle is patently ridiculous.  The minerals collect on a teakettle because you've boiled the water away; you would only be at risk for similar buildup if someone boiled your blood plasma, which would be problematic in other respects.  Your kidneys are perfectly capable of coping with tiny fluctuations in mineral content in your food and drink, which is fortunate, because you get a great deal more in the way of minerals from the vegetables you eat than from your water.  According to a study in 2004, average tap water in the US provided greater than one percent of the recommended daily intake for only four minerals -- copper, calcium, magnesium, and sodium.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And as far as minerals in water causing kidney stones, a 1997 study suggests that calcium and magnesium enriched "mineral water" actually reduces the incidence of kidney stones in individuals who are prone to them.

Then we have this:

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of drinking distilled water for cleansing the blood stream, for reducing arthritic pain and lowering blood pressure.  It has also been known to reduce cholesterol and triglycerides. In fact, the only effect on the body is health. 

There are rules of thumb on how much water to drink.  The rule of thumb on a normal day is one half your body weight in ounces per day.  If you are sweating and exerting yourself you should drink more, not less.  We have a tendency to grab pop, coffee, Kool-Aid and juices, but we need to get back to the habit of grabbing distilled water.

Okay, how much water, now?  The phrase "one half your body weight in ounces per day" can be interpreted two different ways.  For example, I weigh 160 pounds, so if I drank half my body weight every day, that'd be 80 pounds, that's 9.6 gallons of water.  (The recommendation, by the way, is about a half-gallon for a typical adult.)   It's possible, though, that what it means is the number from half my body weight, but in ounces -- so 80 ounces of water.  This is closer to the mark but still seems like a lot to me.  And, of course, you'd get a different answer if you calculated my weight in kilograms, slugs, pennyweights, grains, carats, or solar masses.

If that's not enough, try this:

Now as to the argument that distilled water leaches out minerals.  This is true, and this is exactly what we want it to do.  The minerals it leaches out are of the unusable, ionic form and we want these to leave the body rather than be deposited and cause disease.  Distilled water does not leach out significant amounts of biologically available minerals because these are quickly taken up by the body on an as needed basis.  If they are present in excess then they are filtered through the kidneys and this is exactly what needs to happen with all things which are in excess in the circulation.  Distilled water cleanses the body through promoting healthy kidney function.

Um... no.  You do not want to leach minerals from your body, whether or not they're in "ionic form."  (And some of 'em damn well better be in ionic form.  Such as sodium.  The alternative is elemental sodium, which is a soft, malleable metal that explodes when it touches water.  So consuming non-ionic sodium would be about as advisable as boiling your blood plasma.)  As far as leaching minerals away being good, that's also a nope.  Getting rid of sodium too fast can put you in hyponatremic shock, which can cause dizziness, disorientation, nausea, and severe headaches.  And leaching calcium from your body is what causes, for instance, osteoporosis.

Also not recommended.

And let me reiterate how little in the way of minerals we're talking about, here.  A 2002 study that surveyed the municipal water of a hundred cities in the United States found that Baton Rouge, Louisiana -- the city that was in first place for quantity of minerals -- had a total of a little over eighty parts per million for all the minerals measured combined.

In scientific terms, that's called "ain't much."  And for the other cities, it was all down from there.

Worse still, the "distilled water is wonderful" link she sent me is not one isolated site.  I did a quick search and found dozens of sites touting the health benefits of drinking distilled water, including curing arthritis, chronic headaches, high blood pressure, and (of course) cancer.

After all, what would be the use of a quack cure if it didn't cure cancer?

Oh, and if this isn't sufficient, I also found sites claiming that drinking distilled water would kill you because it leaches out all the minerals in your cells.  Thus proving a sort of Newton's Third Law of Idiocy, that every moronic idea has an equal and opposite moronic idea.

(Incidentally, if you don't believe me -- being a layperson at all -- check out what they say at the site Drinking Water Resources -- neatly debunks both the claims that distilled water is wonderful and that it's deadly.)

So the loyal reader who sent me the link is right; these people are out-homeopathing the homeopaths.  We've gone from serially diluting a chemical past Avogadro's limit to suggesting we drink water that has everything removed from it but the water ahead of time.  At least it's cheaper than most homeopathic "remedies;" last I checked, a gallon of distilled water at my local grocery store was about a buck and a half.

Of course, it's sold in plastic bottles, which I'm sure has to be relevant somehow.

In any case, don't bother with the distilled water.  Plain old tap water is just fine.  Don't count on it to provide your daily mineral needs, though.  The usual advice -- eat well, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol to excess -- is still the best thing around for optimizing your health.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Walking on sunshine

At what point, when someone believes something that is counterfactual, unscientific, and (to put not too fine a point on it) ridiculous, does it become the person's fault for not knowing better?

We live in a culture which, to a large extent, has an expectation that people should be protected from the effects of their own stupidity.  This extends to the availability of insurance, and claims for government aid, when people build their houses in areas that are known to be targets for natural disasters.  When a five million dollar house is built onto a canyon wall in earthquake-prone, mudslide-prone, wildfire-prone California, and it (to borrow a phrase) burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp, and the owner acts all mystified that it happened, how sympathetic should we be?

This question isn't just relevant to matters of property loss; it also is appropriate to ask in a great many issues of personal safety.  Take motorcycle helmet laws.  Take smoking cigarettes.  Who, at this point, doesn't know the dangers of these behaviors?  At some point, it is not the government's responsibility to prevent us from doing stupid stuff; it is ours.

The matter becomes a little fuzzier with medical issues, because (1) people are trained from birth to listen to white-coat-wearing individuals with stethoscopes, (2) there's a huge profit motive to the whole quack-cures industry, inducing charlatans to spend a lot more time and effort pushing their claims, and (3) human physiology is a great deal more complicated than "if you ride a motorcycle without a helmet, and get in an accident, you will be turned into a giant splat mark on the asphalt."  Still, I can't help but think that there is a point at which it is the consumer's personal responsibility to be well enough informed that (s)he won't do anything egregiously idiotic, such as trying to treat an illness by taking pills that have had every last potentially useful molecule removed by serial dilution.

But homeopathy isn't my topic today; the genesis of this post is something even stupider.  Something that makes homeopaths seem worthy of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.  Something so monumentally idiotic that I felt obliged to dig around and see if it could possibly be a hoax.

Tragically, it is not.  It really seems to be true that a Swiss woman died last year -- after a guru convinced her that she could live on sunlight alone.  (Source)

Apparently the woman, whose name was not released by the press but who was a resident of the town of Wolfhalden, had had some health problems, and after being unsatisfied with the medical care she was receiving from actual doctors, she decided to ask a guru's advice.  The guru said he was 70 years old and was still in prime health, and had done it by giving up food and water entirely decades ago.  He said all you had to do was to sit in the sun with large sectors of your skin exposed, absorbing the sun's "life-giving rays," and that if you had reached a high enough plane of spiritual consciousness, that'd be all you'd need not only to survive, but to thrive.

The article didn't say, but I'd bet hard cold cash that the guru also used the words "resonance," "frequency," and "vibration."

Anyhow, the woman didn't do what I'd like to think most of us would do in that situation, which is to burst into guffaws and say, "What the hell?  Do I look like a house plant to you?"  And walk away.  No, she apparently said, "Wow!  I never thought of that!" and proceeded to stop eating and drinking.  She spent a great deal of time sitting, scantily-clad, in the sun.  And amazingly enough, she succeeded not in curing her illnesses -- but in starving to death.

An unanswered question I had is how on earth her friends and relatives let this happen.  If I saw some nimrod I knew stop eating anything and spending large quantities of time sitting outside naked, I think I would probably question whether he'd lost his marbles, and try to intervene.  But either she didn't have enough close friends, or hid it from them well enough, that by the time she was admitted to medical care, it was too late to save her.

This, of course, has elicited calls to prosecute the guru.  My general thought is that this is probably justified, because victimizing stupid people is a pretty terrible thing to do, but there's a part of me that can't get all that worked up about this.  Shouldn't we have an expectation, as a presumably educated society, that people will at least understand biology to the extent that they know that humans cannot conduct photosynthesis?  If there really is someone who is that dumb, or that gullible, should the authorities step in to protect them from the consequences of their foolishness?

I think that at some point, personal responsibility has to kick in.  If we fail to educate ourselves on issues of vital importance to our health and happiness, and then become victims of natural disasters, preventable accidents, hucksters, and frauds, it is no one's fault but our own.  And as far as the Swiss woman who thought she was a plant; this, to me, is just a case of natural selection in action, improving the gene pool for the rest of us.