In the EU, Water Doesn't (Officially) Prevent Dehydration 815
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."
Re:And in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And in the US (Score:4, Interesting)
No more disgusting than gravy/cheese curds or mayonnaise on french fries. People like what they like. I personally put Sriracha sauce (Huy Fong), Chili Garlic Sauce (also Huy Fong), Frank's Red Hot/Tabasco or salsa on just about anything edible, sometimes to make things edible. Not all at once, whichever seems right for the dish in question. Ketchup on pizza could be good with the right toppings. Don't knock it till you try it.
Re:Once Again... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know, I'm sure bottled water companies just wanted to use it as a misleading selling point and marketing. All other kinds of drinks prevent dehydration too, and tap water does too. Compared to countries where you can't actually drink tap water, the bottled waters are seriously overpriced here and they try to sell them by stating how they have minerals, are more healthier and so on.. All kinds of misleading marketing tactics. This decision only prevented the companies for using yet another misleading phrase.
It's a fair amount of this. A while ago I was looking into why all of the zinc remedies for colds were homeopathic, but at reasonable dilutions (1:10, and 1:100). I came up with information that in the US you cannot claim that something is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease unless it is a "drug" as controlled by the FDA. What does the FDA say is a drug? Well, either something listed in the US Pharmacopeia, or in the Homeoapathic Pharmacopeia. As a result, since zinc acetate, and zinc gluconate are only "herbal/mineral supplements" they cannot be listed in the USP, and thus cannot be advertised as diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease (even zinc deficiency). However, since the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia has recently listed the zinc treatments for the treatment and prevention of colds, if a manufacturer actually makes the substance in accordance with Homeopathic law, they can actually call it a drug, and advertise it as treating and preventing colds. (Why don't wall Homeopathic "drugs" make these claims? The FDA still requires the homeopathic "drugs" to have scientific evidence to support a claim to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent a disease. Most don't, zinc compounds do.)
So, as a result of reading all this stuff, I picked up my Iron supplements, which I take for iron deficient anemia, and sure enough on the label it says: "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease." Yes, my iron supplements can't even advertise that they treat, cure, or prevent iron deficiency. The very substance required to cure the deficiency cannot be sold with the claim that it can CURE that deficiency. Why? Same as above, it is an herbal/mineral supplement, and as such is not a "drug" and so it cannot be advertised to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
As water is a food, and not a drug, the US system would come up with the exact same ruling.
Re:Once Again... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the EFSA should have smacked them a little harder, and required that the bottles carry a warning that excessive consumption of this product can lead to a fatal condition called hyponatremia.
For most consumers of bottled water though, they just see their wallet shrink unnecessarily. Most bottle water is straight from the city water supply with a little salts added to for taste. It also happens that the salts tend to increase your thirst and appetite rather than quench it.
Re:And in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, overall I agree with your post. Culinarily, a fruit is sweet and a vegetable savory. That's the big difference, and it's fine for something to be botanically a fruit and culinary a veggie. I just have a few issues with your list of "fruits." First, corn is iffy. There are botanical definitions that exclude it from being a fruit, as the fruit wall is virtually nonexistent. And peanuts? You've got to be kidding me. Yeah, sure, it's a fruiting plant, but you can't seriously tell me you eat the shell. It's an edible seed.
I mean, I get what you're saying, but the edible portion of those two plants are not botanically fruits.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And in the US (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Let's be accurate here (Score:5, Interesting)
The mind boggled when I moved to the US and saw that Coca-Cola cans were prominently labeled "low sodium", and Kellog's Corn Flakes are marked as "*FAT FREE*" (yes, including asterisks).
What's next? Low radioactivity Hershey bars and sugar free eggs?
Re:Once Again... (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems that they actually convened a panel of scientists and determined that the statement was false.
Dehydration (the clinical, medical term), has multiple forms (e.g. hypertonic, hypotonic, isotonic). Dehydration is caused by factors such as burns, vomiting, diarrhea, methamphetamine use, diseases such as cholera, yellow fever, diabetes. Some of those conditions are rather serious--if a doctor thinks a patient is at risk of developing dehydration due to a medical complication, they don't simply give them water to drink, they administer the proper balance of water to electrolytes depending on the condition.
If the bottled water manufacturers had requested a more accurate statement, it would have been so full of technical jargon that they wouldn't be useful as a marketing tag line.
For example Pedialyte is basically just bottled water plus electrolytes, and it is advertised as follows "Use Pedialyte oral electrolyte solution under medical supervision for the dietary management of dehydration due to diarrhea and vomiting."
Wasn't it Tomato Paste? (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not a chef, but I thought it was *tomato paste* rather than *tomato sauce* in the pizza base, which I understand are two different things (Tomato paste just being puréed tomatoes or some such, IIRC)
As for *why* it is there? Well, it's a matter of tastes, here in Asia (at least in my part of the world) people like things spicy and sour. VERY spicy and sour.(Hint, you make *light* pickles in water base, we make a lot more *heavier* pickles in oil base, your pickles taste like flavoured water to us, to be given to kids. Major difference in taste)
Ketchup has vinegar in it, which makes it kinda sour and tangy. Also, in my country, they also give either "Hot&Spicy" (Some chillies thrown in) or "Chili Garlic"(a lot more chillies and garlic paste to boot) ketchup with with it, with people preferring the last.
Pizza without the Chilli Garlic sauce tastes rather salty and bland to our spice-tolerant tongues, with a lot of people having a "chilli-shaker" for the express purpose of adding chillies to that *bland* western food.
So if they can't have the Chilli, they will *at least* put some ketchup to get the sourness. Better some flavour than none!
Re:Once Again... (Score:5, Interesting)
People who haven't seen that epode of QI can find the relevant part here [youtube.com]. It brilliantly exposes the nutbaggery that poses for "euro skepticism" in the UK press (also elsewhere but the UK takes the cake.)
Re:And in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, some numbers have changed their value. "Billion" (and long-scale [wikipedia.org] friends) was redefined in the UK in 1974 (for most uses) to be 10^9 instead of 10^12.
Even mathematical definitions are not absolute. They change, or were obscure to begin with. An annoying example is "natural numbers". Some people include 0, some people include 1. Worse, many people aren't aware of the ambiguity when they use the term. "Ring" has a similar ambiguity. Does the algebraic structure have a 1? Can 1 = 0? Is it commutative? It all depends on what the author is interested in. Hopefully they let you know, but sometimes they don't, and you have to figure out whether these extra properties are being used from context.
Another example from theoretical physics is the term "direct product" when applied to vector spaces. Some physicists use that term in the same way a mathematician would use "tensor product" while others actually use "tensor product", reserving "direct product" for what a mathematician would call a "direct product". As far as I'm aware, there is no ambiguity in the mathematical community about these terms. A physics professor of mine preferred "direct product" in the ambiguous sense. When I asked him why, he told me that tensors were scary to some people, so he wanted to avoid the term if possible. Mathematicians, as a rule, are rather unsympathetic to emotional concerns, so this isn't a very good argument for getting the mathematical community to use the ambiguous definition.
These examples are all annoying, but that's life. Language is the imperfect result of evolution, just like humans are. Evolution usually makes something only "good enough" (examples: the ending of the words "cough", "though", and "rough"; the existence of mental disorders). Even in highly technical disciplines where words often do have immutable meaning, they don't always. The "ring" example is particularly good, since the ambiguity is actually helpful. One can state at the outset "the term 'ring' will denote a unital commutative ring where 1 != 0" without clashing with established notation. The annoyances it generates are from sloppy authors and are typically minor anyway. "Direct product" is rather similar, even if it caused me a few minutes of confusion once ("what? no, that equation is just plain wrong! At the least, those relations severely limit the structure of this object, probably to the point of uselessness! Oh wait. Those are tensor product relations, even though they said direct product. Huh. What a strange convention."). Words change all the time in response to societal factors, and that's not always a bad thing.
Re:Once Again... (Score:4, Interesting)
Misleading point? Does water hydrate the body or not?
No, at least not adequately: if you are actually dehydrated (rather than simply thirsty), then just drinking water will not fix the problem. To quote wikipedia, "[p]lain water restores only the volume of the blood plasma, inhibiting the thirst mechanism before solute levels can be replenished.[17]" If a body is dehydrated, you need an isotonic drink. We've known this just about forever, and this is why you don't give pure water to a diarrhoea sufferer: it'll actually just make their problem *worse*. You mix appropriate quantities of electrolytes (e.g. to the recipe here [webmd.com]).
Re:Stupid counter (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd think that eating is something people would have about as much experience in. Yet you get to see the most harebrained claims on every pack of crap that are either simply not true (like the claim of "no MSG" in soups containing yeast extract) or that are, like in this case, implied by the nature of the product (like the low-carb meat and lard and the low fat bread). Hell, I've even see the claim of "zero calories" on bottled water, to stay on topic.
This is just plain silly. Yet it sells, it seems. If it didn't, if people would consider their intelligence insulted, it wouldn't, would it?
The claim that bottled water prevents dehydration is misleading. The ban doesn't imply that bottled water can't do that. The reason is not that the statement was untrue. Only that it's misleading. The ban is about them not being allowed to say that their source of fluids was in any way superior to other sources when it comes to the question whether they prevent hydration.