A recently introduced product fad hitting store shelves might just prove to be the death of you. Popping up across the country and marketed as yet another “healthy” product in that genre of back-to-nature lifestyle craze — “raw water.” Using pseudo science and earthy, holistic jargon, these start-ups are even putting snake oil salesmen to shame. So what is raw water? Essentially, it is the raw milk trend only now applied to drinking water. You see, unfiltered, untreated water is better for one’s health because it is free from the polluted tampering of mankind and is therefore more “natural.” As an individual in a Live Water marketing campaign exclaims, “A surge of energy and peacefulness entered my being.”

These new companies claim to have tapped into ancient water sources untouched by human industry, and for a mere $16 a bottle you yourself can experience this rawest of water. But wait; there’s more. While this latest “nature” fad may sound funny, it is far from it. The Centers for Disease Control’s chief of Waterborne Disease Prevention, Vincent Hill, warns, “If you’re not filtering it, if you’re not disinfecting it, then you are creating a risk for yourself or anybody you give the water to of diseases and other illnesses that can come from the water.”

It is truly ironic that in the developed world, where scientific knowledge and developments have proven to raise living standards, life expectancy and quality of life, there are those who choose to vilify and distort these achievements as problematic, unhealthy and even dangerous, in order to sell Americans on the flawed concept that human technology equates to the unnatural and therefore unhealthy living. Meanwhile, much of the developing world is plagued with diseases that would have been easily avoided but for the lack of access to clean water technologies.

(Edited.)