EU Ban's bottled water from claiming it prevents dehydration

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/EU-bans-claim-that-water-can-prevent-dehydration.html

If the Technocrats are following the advice of their own scientists this explains a lot.

Read the comment from the idiot at the bottom, he is obviously detached from society and has no idea how communication works between human beings.

Now, my mouth is slightly dry so I'm going to avail myself of the mains supply.

[Beskar]

This one?

He said: “The EU is saying that this does not reduce the risk of dehydration and that is correct.
“This claim is trying to imply that there is something special about bottled water which is not a reasonable claim.”

[Fragony]

Bet it isn't this one

'The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true. ?If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.?

[Husar]

Yes, the whole thing is underexplained, poorly written and it seems like both sides are acting very weird.

First of all, the next time I see "common sense" as a good reason to believe something, I'm going to burn a witch...

Secondly, water alone cannot prevent dehydration but the way it's shown in the article they make it appear like I don't need to drink water anymore and won't have to fear dehydration.
Either the article is spinning it or the EU didn't bother to explain what they actually want to say.

So I can only assume that they mean if you only drink water all day but have no intake of salt etc. you can still dehydrate. You can also still dehydrate due to other health reasons and water can't prevent that.
On the other hand writing "this product can prevent dehydration" on a bottle of water makes me wonder who came up with such an ingenious marketing trick...



edit:

Bet it isn't this one

'The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true. ?If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.?

So the food experts in the EU should solve the financial problems? If your house is on fire, should everybody in the whole Netherlands drop their work and come to help stop the fire?

[Fragony]

'So the food experts in the EU should solve the financial problems?'

EU shouldn't have food-experts, saves us existional debate on what exactly makes a cuccumber

[Ser Clegane]

FYI here are the pdfs of the regulation:

English

German

There are two options:

a) this is complete nonsense
b) if there is any meaningful background to this regulation, whoever wrote it has a serious communication problem

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

This one?

Yes, that one, because the claim was:

　
　
Regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and of concomitant decrease of performance
Nothing about bottled water, and it IS true, regular intake of water reduces the risk of dehydration, you can live for days longer in the heat without food than without water, in the later case you'll keel over in about 24 hours.

Pretending that confounding factors are relevent to this statement is absurd. Yes, I could have a mineral deficiency that caused me to dehydrate but without water I will dehydrate, even if that water comes in fruit juice, or through food.

EU shouldn't have food-experts, saves us existional debate on what exactly makes a cuccumber

Quite.

[CrossLOPER]

Read the comment from the idiot at the bottom, he is obviously detached from society and has no idea how communication works between human beings.

I can actually believe that social retardation is a factor.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Philip, on the face of it this seems completely ridiculous. But on delving a little deeper, the English version PDF posted makes it quite clear why in fact the EU ruling does make a lot of sense. It's all in the detail. From the PDF, the bottled water claim is this:

'Regular consumption of significant amounts of water
can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and
of concomitant decrease of performance'.

Which, as any biologist can tell you, is arrant nonsense. You are not going to prevent dehydration based on a “regular intake”, for the simple reason that you do not store “excess” water in your body (you only store what you need, this is important because if you didn't you would die from all sorts of biochemical processes failing to work properly). Hence, you need to consume water, which can be from any source including solid foodstuffs or yielded as waste from various biochemical processes, each day, and how much you need to consume entirely depends on your environment and your activities. Someone who regularly drinks significant amounts of water but decides to go wandering in the Victoria desert without a hat is equally likely to die from having his pitiful brain cooked as someone who doesn't drink the water but has the same stupid idea.

Unless you are implying that you should deliberately drink so much water that it causes actual swelling of the tissue (by which time you will have other health issues, btw).

... In addition to which, one might notice that the same claim is equally false, and therefore equally ridiculous when made about milk. Do you see “regular intake of milk helps reduce the risk of development of dehydration” ?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Yes, this is one of those things that sounds silly, but actually it's about bottled water companies making bogus healthy claims about their products, trying to push the idea that you need to drink that much water to be healthy.

In other words it's yet another "look at this crazy ridiculous thing the government did!!" stories.

[Kralizec]

Yes, this is one of those things that sounds silly, but actually it's about bottled water companies making bogus healthy claims about their products, trying to push the idea that you need to drink that much water to be healthy.

In other words it's yet another "look at this crazy ridiculous thing the government did!!" stories.

Looks that way.

Also, the cucumber/banana hype from a couple of years back (referenced in the article) is bogus as well.

[Fragony]

'Which, as any biologist can tell you, is arrant nonsense. You are not going to prevent dehydration based on a ?regular intake?, for the simple reason that you do not store ?excess? water in your body'

See nothing wrong with the claim, regular intake means, well regular intake. The EU must think that people are total idiots if they think people need to be protected from thinking they can stock it in their body

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Philip, on the face of it this seems completely ridiculous. But on delving a little deeper, the English version PDF posted makes it quite clear why in fact the EU ruling does make a lot of sense. It's all in the detail. From the PDF, the bottled water claim is this:


Which, as any biologist can tell you, is arrant nonsense. You are not going to prevent dehydration based on a “regular intake”, for the simple reason that you do not store “excess” water in your body (you only store what you need, this is important because if you didn't you would die from all sorts of biochemical processes failing to work properly). Hence, you need to consume water, which can be from any source including solid foodstuffs or yielded as waste from various biochemical processes, each day, and how much you need to consume entirely depends on your environment and your activities. Someone who regularly drinks significant amounts of water but decides to go wandering in the Victoria desert without a hat is equally likely to die from having his pitiful brain cooked as someone who doesn't drink the water but has the same stupid idea.

Unless you are implying that you should deliberately drink so much water that it causes actual swelling of the tissue (by which time you will have other health issues, btw).

... In addition to which, one might notice that the same claim is equally false, and therefore equally ridiculous when made about milk. Do you see “regular intake of milk helps reduce the risk of development of dehydration” ?

Regular intake of milk will reduce the chance of dehydration because it contains water.

The statement that regular consumption of water reduces risk of dehydration is patently true.

This is a case of common usage vs scientific usage. The statement might be construed as untrue in a very strictly defined scientific way, but in the common sense of "hydrated" it is obviously true, to suggest otherwise is to play a nonsense language game.

In the name of Christ, to be "hydrated" means to be "watered".

[Sasaki Kojiro]

NO.

The bottled water people applied for a "reduction of disease risk" claim. They wanted to claim that drinking bottled water is to dehydration as X-food is to lowering cholesterol. But those are very different.

The reason it's being reported differently is that the journalists saw "EU claims water can't hydrate people!!" and were like "Oh yeah, that'll sell!".

[Crazed Rabbit]

Philip, on the face of it this seems completely ridiculous. But on delving a little deeper, the English version PDF posted makes it quite clear why in fact the EU ruling does make a lot of sense. It's all in the detail. From the PDF, the bottled water claim is this:

Which, as any biologist can tell you, is arrant nonsense. You are not going to prevent dehydration based on a “regular intake”, for the simple reason that you do not store “excess” water in your body (you only store what you need, this is important because if you didn't you would die from all sorts of biochemical processes failing to work properly).

What? Are you reading what you've quoted? They say nothing about prevention, but about how drinking water regularly reduces the risk of water.

Hence, you need to consume water, which can be from any source including solid foodstuffs or yielded as waste from various biochemical processes, each day, and how much you need to consume entirely depends on your environment and your activities. Someone who regularly drinks significant amounts of water but decides to go wandering in the Victoria desert without a hat is equally likely to die from having his pitiful brain cooked as someone who doesn't drink the water but has the same stupid idea.

Once they were out in the desert they wouldn't be regularly consuming water, would they?

Prof Brian Ratcliffe, spokesman for the Nutrition Society, said dehydration was usually caused by a clinical condition and that one could remain adequately hydrated without drinking water.
He said: “The EU is saying that this does not reduce the risk of dehydration and that is correct.
“This claim is trying to imply that there is something special about bottled water which is not a reasonable claim.”

This man is stupid. He's making up things about the claim - that water is special - that aren't there.

In the PDF, the bureaucrats state that low water content in the body isn't a risk factor for dehydration, it's just a measurement of dehydration. How they can say that having a low amount of water in your body isn't a factor in being dehydrated is something only bureaucrats can explain.

Anyway, this is just another example of stupid government bureaucrats making decisions on technicalities. Reminds me of blind men studying elephants.

CR

[Tellos Athenaios]

This man is stupid. He's making up things about the claim - that water is special - that aren't there.

In the PDF, the bureaucrats state that low water content in the body isn't a risk factor for dehydration, it's just a measurement of dehydration. How they can say that having a low amount of water in your body isn't a factor in being dehydrated is something only bureaucrats can explain.

Because they don't say that at all? To return the favour: have you actually read... ? They say that “low water content” is dehydration, not a cause.

In the context of bottled water the claim about dehydration is nonsense for the simple reason that all it makes you do (if you're not dehydrated already) is pee more. Your body is quite capable of reducing the effects of dehydration by conserving (sending less to your bladder). Your body is not, however, able to prevent or reduce risk other than through conscious decisions by you to avoid being put at risk in the first place.

To understand this ruling you have to grasp the difference with the following example. Regular intake of Fe3+ ions is good because it helps reduce the risks of various diseases. Therefore it is good for your health to eat iron ion rich food stuffs. Reason: your body is capable of storing some reserve of Fe3+ ions, so that when you ordinarily would run low you've got a backup supply. A regular intake therefore serves to maintain the backup supply at full levels.

With water that's not the case. If you drink water more than you would need for your day to day consumption anyway, all it make your body do is send more water to your bladder in the form of urine. We are not bears, we can't recycle the urine in our bladder as backup water supply, so all water in your bladder is waste (if you don't drink it, afterwards of course).

So intake reduces or prevents nothing in the sense that it will not help you if you do not suffer from dehydration already. If you suffer already we're past prevention or lowering risks already. So the bottom line is that there is no window of time wherein this claim holds true. In other words it is completely bogus.

Add to this that your body extracts water from all the food and drink you consume, and you may observe that by definition everyone has a regular intake of water. If they don't, they're dead. At which point the claim is ridiculous on a technical level: it is arrant nonsense.

That is actually the generous, benevolent way of looking at things. The less generous approach would highlight how the ill educated public might associate water exclusively with the drink they might buy or tap...

[Tellos Athenaios]

Regular intake of milk will reduce the chance of dehydration because it contains water.

The statement that regular consumption of water reduces risk of dehydration is patently true.

No it won't. As I've just explained above, this is one of those cases where intuition/gut instinct is simply completely and utterly wrong. There is really no chance of dehydration, there is only the odds that someone consumes enough water given his activities in his environment.

[Cute Wolf]

WTF? seriously, those guys at EU who make the ban doesn't deserve to graduate from Junior High

[Tellos Athenaios]

The EU must think that people are total idiots if they think people need to be protected from thinking they can stock it in their body

Well they can, and you do (roughly 75% of you is water, after all). Just not to the point that you can store reserves. Dehydration does not care whether or not you were a good boy yesterday, or even last hour. All that matters is whether or not you have enough now, and now, and now, and now... ad infinitum. Consuming a volume of water (that which is passed on from your digestive system to the rest of your body, anyway) means to render you able to dispose of an equivalent volume of water *without* incurring dehydration. Your body has no choice but to dispose of water in any case, primarily because you have no other option when disposing waste or heat, and so you will often run a bit low on water levels.

That is, until you die you will always, each day be dehydrated at some point, no matter how regular your intake. Most notably after you wake from sleep, you will be (hopefully just a little) dehydrated. When you are thirsty, you are *already* dehydrated to such an extent your body feels the need to interrupt your higher order brain functions with a low level plea for drink.

[Tellos Athenaios]

It's like getting mad at the people who make the $.50 Air Machines at Gas Stations if they put a sign on the machine that said "Our air can help prevent your tires from deflating."

No the thread is about getting mad at EU people who do a biology fact check and decide that the claim made is bogus and then reject the application for it to be used in marketing campaigns as if it were medical fact. There's a subtle difference in there somewhere.

I disagree. I, for one, am not fussed about tossing out a bogus claim from a marketing campaign.

Yep our air cannot help your tires from deflating either. However, it can help your tires from deflating past a certain pressure point within a certain time frame, something which uncompressed air cannot. So there's at least the smallest amount of relevance to that claim, other than marketing guff.

[Fragony]

'That is actually the generous, benevolent way of looking at things. The less generous approach would highlight how the ill educated public might associate water exclusively with the drink they might buy or tap...'

My world just got scarier

[Crazed Rabbit]

Because they don't say that at all? To return the favour: have you actually read... ? They say that “low water content” is dehydration, not a cause.
...

If you haven't consumed water in any form for some hours, does not then drinking water lower the risk you'll become dehydrated?

So intake reduces or prevents nothing in the sense that it will not help you if you do not suffer from dehydration already.

So there's no difference in terms of becoming dehydrated if I drink half a liter of water before going for a long run or if I don't drink that water?

CR

[Tellos Athenaios]

'That is actually the generous, benevolent way of looking at things. The less generous approach would highlight how the ill educated public might associate water exclusively with the drink they might buy or tap...'

My world just got scarier

What's scary about it? That some people might fail to spot the nonsense for what it is?

[Fragony]

What's scary about it? That some people might fail to spot the nonsense for what it is?

Was talking more in general. Was on the roof of a building and there was no 'DO NOT JUMP FROM THIS BUILDING look for more information on www.heightsaredangerous.eu' sticker, I could have died

[Tellos Athenaios]

So there's no difference in terms of becoming dehydrated if I drink half a liter of water before going for a long run or if I don't drink that water?

No. After that long run you will be dehydrated, too. Two and a half glass of water isn't going to prevent you from feeling thirsty after that long run. Now you could say: just drink much more water. But again, no you won't make a difference if you do it that way except that now your bladder will end up uncomfortably full.

It would have made a difference if you frequently drunk small amounts of water while running, you see, because then your body would not suddenly have to deal with the drop in salt levels that necessitate dumping water in the bladder.

But that is, unfortunately, at odds with “regular intake will reduce the risk...” If you didn't do that run, but took a walk instead you would've needed far less water. And if you did nothing, you might get by without consuming any during that time.

Instead of trying to invoke intuition as if that somehow makes it right, could you tell me where my view is wrong of the human body as absorbing only as much water until it doesn't want any more and dumping any more as waste?

[Tellos Athenaios]

No, sir! My point still stands. Consider:

I would propose to you that the underlying cause of all this ire (if you could, you know, read peoples' minds and find out) is that people don't like big companies. So they look for any reason, however niggling, to cause trouble for these companies. I can sympathize with this, although I try not to act on it. It's a pretty unfortunate way for policy to be written. So all the legal mumbo becomes moot when we consider that it is still based off of pure and simple trolling.

It's like if life was a message board, and BigWaterCompany666 was somebody that nobody really liked. BigWaterCompany666 posts something that is not offensive, or in any other way remarkable except that it is completely obvious and perhaps not phrased very well. Then, the local forum troll (Whom wel'll call LawyerGuy999) decides he's gonna have his way with this sod because he just doesn't like him very much. LawyerGuy999, being a very eloquent dude, gets everyone all riled up at BigWaterCompany666--whom nobody liked anyway.

So... try and beat that with a stick.

Easy. Statements about being beneficial for your health must have some semblance of truth otherwise you risk them being bannedfrom your marketing campaigns, you see. Just in case you were actually making it up, or doing make believe, like Yakult.
The best BigWaterCompany666 came up with, apparently, was this:

Upon request for clarification, the applicant proposed water loss in tissues or reduced water content in tissues as risk factors of dehydration.

Another claim binned, then.

[Tellos Athenaios]

No, my question is: what is wrong with the EU ruling? Like, really, factually wrong. Not like: well but grandma always said this. Or like: well I think that.

[Ironside]

No, sir! My point still stands. Consider:

I would propose to you that the underlying cause of all this ire (if you could, you know, read peoples' minds and find out) is that people don't like big companies. So they look for any reason, however niggling, to cause trouble for these companies. I can sympathize with this, although I try not to act on it. It's a pretty unfortunate way for policy to be written. So all the legal mumbo becomes moot when we consider that it is still based off of pure and simple trolling.

It's like if life was a message board, and BigWaterCompany666 was somebody that nobody really liked. BigWaterCompany666 posts something that is not offensive, or in any other way remarkable except that it is completely obvious and perhaps not phrased very well. Then, the local forum troll (Whom wel'll call LawyerGuy999) decides he's gonna have his way with this sod because he just doesn't like him very much. LawyerGuy999, being a very eloquent dude, gets everyone all riled up at BigWaterCompany666--whom nobody liked anyway.

So... try and beat that with a stick.

It's only the minor detail that BigWaterCompany666 is trying to troll the population in a obvious money making scheme. And the goverment is supposed to protect about such matter. Homeopathy also "cures" dehydration btw, scientific proven.
I guess if the company is forced to place warning labels things gets equal. "Warning, this product contains a high amount of dihydrogenoxide. Accidental inhalation of dihydrogenoxide causes thousands of deaths every year."

Or breathing liquid water is bad for you.

[Fragony]

No, my question is: what is wrong with the EU ruling? Like, really, factually wrong. Not like: well but grandma always said this. Or like: well I think that.

Everything, it's everything that's wrong with the EU summarised in a screaming example of petty patronage.

[rory_20_uk]

The EU is merely trying to justify its existence with such wastes of time. I wonder how long this ruling took, and at what cost.