EU Ban's bottled water from claiming it prevents dehydration

[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...