Raw nonsense

Despite the fact that our modern lifestyle has increased our life expectancy to longer than it's ever been in the history of humanity, romanticizing the practices of the past is still ridiculously widespread.

People who claim that "everything causes cancer" conveniently ignore two things: first, that a good many forms of cancer would decline dramatically if we'd do things doctors recommend, like cutting out tobacco and getting vaccinated against HPV; and second, that one of the reasons cancer rates have climbed is that we're no longer dying of other stuff, like diphtheria, typhoid, measles, and smallpox.

But that kind of thinking seldom makes any inroads into the minds of people committed to anti-vaxx (or completely anti-medical) propaganda.  The levels of irrationality some of this thinking reaches are truly staggering.  I had one person comment on one of my posts -- in all apparent seriousness -- "my great-grandma never got vaccinated against anything, and she survived."

Well, of course she did.  If she'd died at age three of diphtheria, she wouldn't have been your great-grandma, now would she?

How about asking great-grandma how many of her siblings and cousins died of childhood infectious diseases -- like my grandfather's two oldest sisters, Marie-Aimée and Anne-Désée, who died five days apart at the ages of 22 and 16 -- of measles.

The person who posted that comment should win some sort of award for compressing the greatest number of fallacies into the shortest possible space.  Confirmation bias, cherry-picking, anecdotal evidence, and the post hoc fallacy, all in nine words.  Kind of impressive, actually.

Despite all this, there are huge numbers of people who want to return to what our distant ancestors did, claiming that it's "healthier" or "more natural," conveniently neglecting the fact that back then, as Thomas Hobbes so trenchantly put it, "life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The result is the kind of thing I ran into in an article in Ars Technica last week about a trend I hadn't heard of, which is to drink "raw water."  "Raw water," which you might guess from the name, is water that hasn't been filtered or treated, but is collected (or even bottled and sold) right from a spring or river or whatnot.  And predictably, what happened was that nineteen people fell ill with a diarrheal disease (specifically Campylobacter jejuni) when it turned out that their trendy "natural spring water" turned out to be just ordinary runoff from a creek drainage that had been contaminated by bacteria from bird nests.

The amount of pseudoscience you run into with this stuff is astonishing.  In researching this topic, I found people who claim that "industrially-processed water" (i.e. most tap water) has "mind-control drugs" in it, designed to turn us all into Koolaid-drinkin' sheeple, and even one that said treatment plants deliberately "alter the molecular structure of water, turning it into a toxin."

Making me wonder how, or if, these people passed high school chemistry.

I spent the summers during my twenties and thirties back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics, and I know how careful you have to be.  The clearest bubbling mountain brook can be contaminated with nasty stuff like Giardia and Salmonella, two diseases that should be high on the list of germs you never want to have inside you.  I used iodine sterilizing tablets for all the water I drank -- and I never got sick.  But I knew people who did, and as one of them vividly described it, "Having Giardia means that for three weeks you're going to be on a first-name basis with your toilet."

Which is funny until you find out that in the process, he lost twenty pounds and spent three days in the hospital hooked up to an IV so he could stay hydrated.

Look, I know our high-tech world isn't perfect.  I know about pesticides and herbicides and industrial contamination and coverups and food additives with dubious health effects.  My wife and I try as hard as we can to eat locally-sourced organic meat and produce, not to mention growing our own vegetables.  But the admittedly true statement that technology and the pharmaceuticals industry have created some problems does not equate to "therefore we should jettison everything they provide and return to the Stone Age."

Speaking of fallacies, there's another one for you: the package-deal fallacy.  You get into this stuff, it reads like the "what not to do" section of a critical thinking textbook.

So if you're inclined to switch over to "raw water," just don't.  Drinking water is treated for a reason.  Our Stone Age ancestors didn't have such great lives, and idealizing it as some kind of idyllic Garden of Eden is complete horse shit. 

Horse shit ironically being one of the things that might well be in your "raw water."

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Living waters

Okay, this "raw foods" fad has gone too far.

Understand that I'm not talking about eating things like raw vegetables.  In general, most of us would benefit from eating more vegetables, raw or cooked, not only because it's healthy, but because growing plants for food has a lower negative impact on the environment than raising animals for food.

But there's a point where people decide that a certain word has positive connotations in all contexts, and that's what's happened with the word "raw" amongst health-food types.  This is why we have people eating meat that's not only raw, but thoroughly decomposed (they call it "high meat" and say it's "probiotic"), and a couple in Australia whose child died of an E. coli infection after drinking raw milk.

So you can see that "raw" doesn't translate to "good for you."  Nor, apparently, even to "something in an uncooked state that is usually eaten cooked." This is why there is now a company that is selling, I kid you not...

... "raw water."

The California-based company "Live Water" is now selling, for $15 per 2.5-gallon jug ($11 each if you go for the quantity discount and buy twenty or more), "Fountain of Truth fresh raw spring water."  Which is supposedly better for you than other kinds of water.  Here's the sales pitch from their website:

At the spring head fire agates and 108,000 gallons of water per minute levitate out of a lava tube.  It's been in constant offering at that exact same flow rate, since it was first measured in 1925 until now.  The water is from a time when earth was pristine, and is estimated to have matured below the surface for up to 10,000 years before surfacing.

Imagine its journey as it's flowing through vast networks of crystal lined lava tubes to the surface.  Major science has concluded that their [sic] is a body of water with a larger volume than all our oceans combined in the core of the earth.  This is the earth's way of cleansing water, and offering it back to us with a fresh new start... 

The extensive water analysis shows super high levels of natural silica.  Silica is essentially pure liquid crystals.  Silicone [sic] holds information and energy in a unique way, thats [sic] why all our devices run off of them, hence the name silicone valley [sic].  Imagine how it would feel to upgrade your brain's entire operating system to the best computer chips available.  Silica is also known as the beauty mineral, very rarely found in any food or supplements... 

In it's [sic] natural cycle water is infinitely chemically and energetically complex.  Water goes down into the soil and becomes the perfect probiotic as it passes through microbes and micro-organisms in the humus.  It picks up bio-available mono atomic elements and minerals that just can't be replicated.  We have done our best to keep it pristine. 

Okay, let's see.  Where do I start?

First: silica, silicon, and silicone are not the same thing.  Silica is, essentially, glass, so saying it's "pure liquid crystals" is nonsense, as is the idea that consuming silica would "upgrade your brain's entire operating system."  Silicon is an element, atomic number 14, which is a very common atom in most rocks.  Silicone, on the other hand, is a polymer of silicon, oxygen, and organic functional groups, and is used for (among other things) making aquarium cement and breast implants.  (You have to wonder which application gave rise to "Silicone Valley.")

But what's really wildly wrong about this is claiming that there's something unique about water that has been underground for a long time (and underground water deposits don't get anywhere near the core of the Earth, I feel obliged to point out).  Deep aquifer water is often quite pure, but it's no healthier for you than any other pure water source.  And if the water, on its way to the surface, passes through soil and humus and picks up "microbes and micro-organisms," this is, in general, a bad thing.  Not only do unpurified water sources contain such special offers as E. coli, they can also contain Giardia lamblia (giardiasis is basically a month-long bout of severe stomach flu), and in some parts of the world, cholera, cryptosporidiosis, amoebic dystentery, and shigellosis.

All of which can kill you.

So the bottom line is that gulping down unfiltered, untreated water from your nearby stream is a good way to die, or at least to be awfully unhappy for several weeks.  And I certainly wouldn't trust a company whose webpage is that full of complete, grade-A bullshit, not to mention spelling errors, to adhere to safety standards well enough to be aware of whether their fifteen-buck jugs of water contain pathogens or not.

So I'll just stick with my good old cooked water, thanks very much.  There's a reason why we don't die of horrible diseases at nearly the rates we did a hundred years ago.  And I, for one, am not going to throw caution to the wind just so I can say I drink "raw water."