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In the EU, Water Doesn't (Officially) Prevent Dehydration
New Kohath writes with this news from The Guardian: "Bottled water producers applied to the EU for the right to claim that 'regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration'. The health claim was reviewed by a panel of 21 scientists on behalf of the European Food Standards Authority. The application was denied, and now producers of bottled water are forbidden by law from making the claim. They will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the EU edict."
“This claim is trying to imply that there is something special about bottled water which is not a reasonable claim.”
Look, people, this is The Telegraph. They are incredibly biased and unprofessional when it comes to the EU. They will happily lie about anything if it makes the EU look bad.
Anything they say about the EU is pretty much guaranteed to be garbage. Please don't encourage this kind of dishonesty by giving them pageviews.
Fruit is a biological term, vegetable is a culinary term. Tomatoes can be both, why does everyone have such a hard time with this?
(ketchup, on the other hand... is awesomeness but yes, Congress is completely bought and sold by all lobbies, including the processed food and frozen pizza lobbies)
Someone at the Guardian wrote about this. It was not submitted by bottled water manufacturers:
Now, the ruling from the EU says that the application failed to comply with Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006, which states "It is necessary to ensure that the
substances for which a claim is made have been shown to have a beneficial nutritional or physiological effect".
I'm guessing that the point where this application tripped up is that they didn't suggest how much water or how often would be beneficial and apparently didn't provide any evidence for the claim, so they haven't actually shown it is beneficial as required by Article 14.
yeh, here bottle water is about twice as expensive as the heavily taxed gasoline, and the tap water is generally from deep underground filtered through soil for something like 60 years so it is better in every measureable way. bottled water companies will do everything they can to sell the idea that drinking they stuff will make you healthy, sporty, rich, successfull ....
The original decision.
Breakfast served all day!
That had nothing to do with government greed. It was the right ruling. Should the government tax tomatoes as vegetables? Well, you might say that they are a fruit, and vegetables are things like cucumbers, squash, peppers, eggplant, string beans, pea pods, corn, okra, right? Problem is, everything I just mentioned is also botanically a fruit (fruits that, for some strange reason, people don't embarrass themselves by pointing out that that they're botanical fruits like they do with tomatoes). Cucumbers and squash are pepos (which are actually a type of berry), corn (and wheat and rice) is a type of fruit called a caryopsis, peanuts and string beans are legumes, and eggplant and peppers are berries. Fruit has both a culinary AND scientific meaning. Culinary, it is a sweet part of the plant that is almost always a botanical fruit, but that does not imply that a botanical fruit is also a culinary fruit. Scientifically, milkweed pods, cotton pods, and those little helicopters that fall from maple trees are fruits. Chocolate covered cucumber sound good to you? What about tomato ice cream, or pea pod pie? No? That's because they're not fruits in the everyday speech. You're going to stop calling peanuts and almonds nuts (peanut is a legume and almond is a drupe) or stop calling potatoes root vegetables (they're tubers, which are stems), and no one is calling rice, peppers, or string beans fruits, so why this fixation on the fact that tomatoes are botanical fruits?
Vegetable has no scientific meaning, so it is perfectly reasonable to consider something a botanical fruit and a culinary vegetable. Just by mentioning the term, we know that we're speaking in culinary or horticultural terms, not pure botanical terms. Something can be a root and a vegetable (like carrots) a stem and a vegetable (like potatoes), a leaf and a vegetable (lettuce), a flower and a vegetable (broccoli), and things can be a botanical fruit and a vegetable too. Culinary fruits don't need to be a botanical fruit either. The best example is the strawberry. The actual fruits are the the little seeds on the outside (called achenes), whereas the culinary part is just the large swollen receptacle, which is a modified stem. I think botanists consider the whole thing, both the achenes and the receptacle to be the fruit, so that is a pretty weak example, but that should at least make you think about what a fruit really is. Historically, rhubarb was considered a fruit at times. However, if I gave you a cashew apple (yes, every cashew nut has a fruit to go along with it) or if I gave you the 'fruit' of a native cherry or Japanese raisin tree, you might not be able to tell that they aren't actually fruits. The lleuque 'fruit' doesn't even come from an angiosperm (only angiosperms have fruit)! If any of those were commercially cultivated, what would we call them? Vegetables? Should we regulate something that in terms of cultivation and use is more similar to a cherry like a radish just because of some botanical nitpick? I don't think so.
So, if we were speaking strictly scientifically, we'd treat corn, chili peppers, and pea pods the same as apples, grapes, andbananas. But that'd be pretty darned stupid, right? That's why we don't do it. The government made the right call there. I imagine someone was just being a smartass to get out of some taxes.
Bear in mind that we're certainly looking at a translation of what the actual advertising claim was, and possibly a biased one. There's this Nestle PureLife water commercial to consider. In it, a bunch of girls on a soccer team run up to their coach and are handed sports drinks and the coach tells them to "drink up [they're] losing a lot of water out there", and one of the girls asks why, if they're losing water, they don't just drink water. The coach has a dumbfounded expression for a moment, then takes the sports drinks back, and hands out Nestle PureLife water instead. The voiceover then says that nothing hydrates like water.
The medically correct answer to the little girls question is that, when exercizing, you lose salts and carbohydrates as well as water. Proper rehydration replaces those as well. Given that the commercial is presenting what amounts to (potentially fatal in extreme conditions) medical advice, it amounts to false advertising. In the United States, it's clear that the government just doesn't care about false advertising any more, but in the EU, they actually take consumers being lied to by corporations in the name of profit seriously.
Thankfully, common sense, just like old wives tales, are not allowed as a basis for making medical claims. In order to make a medical claim, you have to get approval, after having performed 3 phases of trials. A process which will typically take around 10 years. And the trials involve testing against a control. I'd suggest that the most reasonable control against which to test bottled water is water. And I'd further suggest that the bottled water companies would be wasting their time doing that, because it's going to show that their product is no better at reducing the chances of dehydration.
There's no problem at all with bottled water companies claiming their product quenches thirst - that's not a medical claim. And everybody would understand exactly what they mean by that. But they are quite rightly prevented from trying to bamboozle people with disingenuous medical claims.
(If you look at the date on the document I just linked to, you'll notice that this was all published in February, which makes it remarkable that so many journalists happened to leap on this story at the same time, completely independently of each other, without anyone copying what anyone else did or churnalizing each other in any way whatsoever).
So what about the actual claim? Well you can read the EU's ruling here (PDF), and the first thing to note is that this isn't really a rule so much as a piece of advice, which member states are free to interpret as they wish.
...The specific health claim tested is outlined in the ruling:
The regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and of concomitant decrease of performance.
The claim wasn't submitted for a genuine product, but was created as a deliberate 'test' exercise by the two professors, who were apparently already unhappy with the European Food Standards Authority. The panel were well aware of it's absurdity too, noting drily that "the proposed risk factors," the conditions addressed by the hypothetical product, in this case water loss, "are measures or water depletion and thus are measures of the disease (dehydration)."
Leaving that aside, there are two major problems with the claim: drinking water doesn't prevent dehydration, and drinking-water doesn't prevent dehydration.
Firstly, "regular consumption" of water doesn't reduce the risk of dehydration any more than eating a pork pie a day reduces the risk of starvation. If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I'll still end up dehydrated, and if I drink several bottles today, that won't prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow. The key is to drink enough water when you need it, and you're not going to get that from any bottled water product unless it's mounted on a drip.
Secondly, dehydration doesn't just mean a lack of water, or 'being thirsty'; electrolytes like sodium are important too. If salt levels fall too far, the body struggles to regulate fluid levels in the first place. That's why hospitals use saline drips to prevent dehydration in patients who can't take fluids orally, and why people with diarhhoea are treated with salt-containing oral rehydration fluids. Presumably the next big investigation at the Express will expose the shocking waste of NHS money on needless quantities of saline solution, when jolly old tap water would work just as well.
So the ruling seems pretty sensible to me, or at least as sensible as a ruling can be when the claim being tested is vexatious in the first place. It's accurate advice, and it prevents companies selling bottled water from making exaggerated claims for their products, which is a good thing. They even have the support of the British Soft Drinks Association, who tweeted just as this piece was going live with the following statement:
The European Food Safety Authority has been asked to rule on several ways of wording the statement that drinking water is good for hydration and therefore good for health. It rejected some wordings on technicalities, but it has supported claims that drinking water is good for normal physical and cognitive functions and normal thermoregulation.
It's also an great opportunity to challenge received wisdom, and to make the point that keeping the human body hydrated is about much more than just drinking tap water when you're thirsty. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of journalists are more interested in promoting second-hand hysteria than informing their readers. Which is a bit sad.
The British press loves running with EU-hating politicians and as a result is just as stupid.
The article even continued the bent banana and cucumber lie, these were never banned from sale but produce with abnormal curvature could for easy of packaging and transport not be offered as Class 1.
What this article conveniently leaves out is the bottling companies wanted a claim insinuating BOTTLED water is the best / only way to combat dehydration.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Through most of Europe, tap water is perfectly drinkable, and healthier that bottled water. So what this European committee ruled on is whether companies selling bottled water have the right to promote them by claiming that they have a therapeutic benefit. I think it's quite ok to reject this claim.
In my office, we have this big fridge distributing bottled drinks, made available by a company linked to Coca-Cola. It comes with printed claims and brochures explaining what we need to drink at least 4 x 5 dl per day (the machine contains free bottles of 5 dl).
I'm an MD, and while a liquid intake of 1.5 to 2 liters is generally needed, it is wise to get most of it from the tap, or from soups and vegetables. You can certainly live well without any "drinks" - and premature death is guaranteed to those who would drink four bottles of these sugary drinks every day.