web stats

Are Water Ionizer Products a Scam?

Posted by admin
Acid/Alkaline, Cancer, Ionized Water

There is a lot of controversy these days over alkaline water, ionizers, and if they really do what they say they do. I want to produce the opposing view point and comment at the end. Here is a quote from well known Dr Weil (who makes a fantastic living n the internet selling his own products!).

Does Alkaline Water Promote Health? Manufacturers of water ionizers state that their products produce more alkaline water, which allows your body to better absorb minerals and antioxidants from water. Are these health claims real? Do you recommend ionizers?

Home water ionizers, which I've seen offered for sale on the internet, are just the latest twist in the ongoing effort to promote the notion that alkaline water is somehow protective of your health. The underlying idea is that you can prevent disease by balancing your body's pH. Promoters claim that alkaline water is energizing, hydrates the body more effectively than regular water, improves the taste of food when used in cooking, promotes "regularity," helps the body absorb nutrients more effectively, and on and on. I've even seen claims that it can cure everything from obesity and high blood pressure to breast cancer.

None of these claims are true. Furthermore, your body needs absolutely no help in adjusting its pH. Normally, the pH of blood and most body fluids is near seven, which is close to neutral. This is under very tight biological control because all of the chemical reactions that maintain life depend on it. Unless you have serious respiratory or kidney problems, body pH will remain in balance no matter what you eat or drink. As for water, you should consider the fact that alkaline water is common throughout the western states but to my knowledge it has not protected anyone from the diseases and disorders that occur elsewhere in the U.S.

The health claims for water ionizers and for alkaline water are bogus. Save your money.

Andrew Weil, M.D.

 


So are health claims for ionizers and alkaline water bogus? Dr Weil doesn't give a reason for stating that health benefits are bogus so it is difficult to address his assertion. 

Natural Cure for Diabetes Type 2

I can, however, address the "your body needs no help adjusting its pH" claim.

Let us look at this rationally. Your body DOES have an intricate system that maintains the internal pH of your body. What happens if you continuously stress that system? 

We already know that there is acidity in our outside environment. (Think Acid Rain) Acid rain is caused from chemicals, pollutants and a number of other materials both manmade and natural (volcanic ash). The air we breath is acidic for the same reasons. The food we eat (processed and pesticide/herbicide treated) are often acidic. 

So we breathe, eat and drink compounds that are already acidic or create acidity once in our bodies. Our body must work very very hard to combat these toxins and poisons and it is not adapted to that through evolution yet. When it gets overcome with poisons (which cause acidity) then disease occurs. Now what about in the meantime… before our body shows signs of over toxicity by way of disease, our body is working overtime to maintain a pH of around 7. It has a number of controls (buffers) that allow it to do this. 

Do you think that if you removed some of the exposures to acid inducing pollutants, detoxified the body of heavy metals and toxins, and drank alkaline, oxygenated water instead of acid rain… do you think that there would be LESS burden on this delicate buffering system. IF there was less burden on this buffering system, does it make sense that it would last longer and continue to be able to maintain a safe and healthy pH? 

To say that this system needs no help to maintain body pH is ludicrous. DEATH occurs when this system fails without help. This is a typical doctor answer though. I mean the body has a very intricate system of maintaining blood sugar too doesn't it? UNTIL it fails… and then diabetes results. But you can help THAT system and even prevent diabetes type 2. ALL body systems can be 'helped' to prevent overload and reduce stress on the system, thus giving the system longer life. But if Dr Weil wants us to continue drinking acid rain, it certainly does help him sell his supplements and gives him people to write prescriptions for.

I believe  alkaline, ionized real water –  is a MUCH healthier alternative to drinking Acid Rain. Does Dr Weil REALLY disagree with that? How could he? 

 

 

RSS Feed Add to Del.cio.us Add to Technorati Favorites Stumble It! Digg It!
    www.sajithmr.com
Add to Technorati Favorites


This blog uses automatic posting software, which uses articles that are in the public domain (article directories and such) relevant to the topic, and posts them without being reviewed by a human. If you find an issue with any article, please contact us immediately. We will do our best to reply promptly! shelpenney {at} yahoo.ca

Related posts:

  1. What Mike Adams Thinks of Ionized Water. Drinking water with higher alkalinity is good for your health,...
  2. Ray Kurzweil and Alkaline Water Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors...
  3. Why Alkaline Water is Healthy Water Water is the most crucial factor in establishing and maintaining...
  4. Ray Kurzweil and Anti-aging According to Kurzweil, good health depends on maintaining a slightly...
  5. 3 Key Reasons to Drink Alkaline Water. There are many benefits to the body from drinking Ionized...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

13 Comments to Are Water Ionizer Products a Scam?

Lawrence Forsley
April 25, 2009

I am a chemist and a physicist. I have spent nearly 30 years observing specific properties of water for a variety of reasons. I am continually astonished at the gullibility and increasingly pseudo-science hype afforded to such nonsense as this. All to many of my friends have fallen prey to a host of multi-level-marketing, pseudo-science-based health scams such as yours. This is worse than snake oil.

admin
April 25, 2009

Hello Lawrence: Thank you so much for your comments. I am going to leave this comment but I am going to ask that if you return that you please provide some logical back up for your arguments, and refrain from rudeness and name calling. Credentials are not a substitute for lack of manners, and this is after all my website. :-) )

I would like to mention that if you want to convert the world to your way of thinking and you don’t have enough influence to even “save” your friends and family then either your approach, or your “science” is flawed.

I would love to hear more of your opinion respectfully submitted and backed up with some logic that we can either evaluate or refute.

This would be a great place to start if you are up to it.
http://www.realwaterhealth.com/quackwatch-and-the-acidalkaline-water-theory/

anonymous
May 17, 2009

Hi there,
I am just a regular consumer who has been researching all the ways to get better drinking water after my naturopath told me that reverse osmosis is best. I quickly discovered many things: there is a lot of information on the internet, much of it is contradictory and confuses the reader more rather than help them and there are far too many choices out there. As an example, with reverse osmosis you do get pure water but it leaves out the ‘good’ minerals at the same time. I’m still unclear if it is the best choice. I then came across alkaline water and ionizers and must say was considering buying an ionizer until I read the information on this website (good thing I didn’t give up my research; even when I am convinced something is good I still do a search on the topic with ‘scam’ behind it to see the other side of the coin):

http://www.chem1.com/CQ/ionbunk.html

I believe you will find lots of logic and proof to refute any claim made about alkaline water and ionizers. We’ll see if you keep this comment posted after you’ve read this informative webpage!

admin
May 18, 2009

Hi there anonymous. Thank you so much for your comment. Why do you think I would delete your comment just because you offer a website with an opposing point of view? I would be more likely to remove it because of the anonymous nature. But just as I am entitled to my opinion, so are you respectfully entitled to yours. Once again, please read http://www.realwaterhealth.com/quackwatch-and-the-acidalkaline-water-theory/

For all that these detractors claim to want to embrace “real science” they do not seem to have a good idea of how the body actually maintains a neutral to very slightly alkaline pH.

One thing that is very important to understand. That even science is subject to interpretation of results, and most scientists and doctors do not agree on what results mean. I have a lot of respect for doctors and scientists, but life doesn’t happen in the lab, and almost ALL of the intricaies of how our bodies work are based on theories.

Most of what is stated as “science” on that site is in fact theory and pseudoscience itself.

Brian
November 28, 2009

First, I realize that alkaline water and ionized water are not the same thing. It seems more scientific knowledge exists about the pH levels of things than does the ionization.

Here’s the catch with ionized water: neither your claims nor the claims of skeptics can be substantiated yet.

It takes multiple, independent, peer reviewable scientific studies to replicate the same results to prove the claims to be true or false. And even after that, it takes many years of perfecting the procedures to get the perfect ionized water – and then even more years of drinking the water to see if any positive or negative effects occur.

I’ve yet to find any sources of information pertaining to real studies done on the ionization of water using the scientific method. If any exists, I’d love to find it; please give us any links you have for info published by any accredited / academically established research group.

If such information is not available, you can’t definitively prove OR disprove your claims – or anyone else’s for that matter.

As for the debate on alkaline water, I wanted to comment about the body’s need to maintain the pH of blood so that acidosis or alkalosis does not occur. Expelling CO2 from the lungs is one of the primary ways the body keeps check on the acid level from becoming too concentrated. It would seem that practicing deep breathing exercises would be more beneficial than introducing large amounts of alkaline water to the body. To me, it also seems more sensical to eat a balanced variety of acidic and alkaline foods so that the average pH of all foods consumed would be close to neutral – and that would put less stress on the body’s buffers for regulating pH.

A pH of 7 is neutral and the blood’s healthy range is from 7.35 to 7.45 which means it is slightly alkaline. I can see why a slightly alkaline diet would be good, but of course overdoing it would tax the body’s resources to keep the pH down to that range.

And that’s why I personally deduce that a well balanced diet of raw or unprocessed foods free of harmful chemicals/pathogens and deep breathing of fresh air is all we really need… unless some proven repeatable results are found to verify the claims of ionized water or higher concentrations of alkaline substances.

I’m leaving my mind open to the possibility that the claims could be proven true; I’m merely waiting for the real proof.

Rachel Yoon
January 4, 2010

I came to have more interest in water and did a lot of on-line research since my husband started to promote Ionizer. As Brian’s comment, I encountered both negative and positive theories on alkaline water. So what to trust? I totally agree that doctors and scientists present what they believe and often they have different opinions.
I am originally from Korea and I trust oriental approach to health (holistic treatments, working on causes, and using natural ingredients) more than western approach (treating symptoms, using chemical drugs). And I believe alternative healings came to the western world so late because of the symoptom treating medical system and the power of the phamaceutical industry. Not succeeding in finding real proof of alkaline water, I started to research information available in Korea as Japan and Korea has much longer history of researching the benefits of alkaline water. That is when I started to see that alkaline water is not snake oil and it will get eventually approved like echinacea. (The effect of echinacea was researched mostly in Germany until it became to be widely known in North America even though North American Natives knew its benefits and used it over 400 years.)
I decided to share information I find from Korean resources and created a blog. I personally drink ionized alkaline water and I don’t have constipation any more. (believe me. I suffered from it over 10 years.) I will never go back to water I used to drink before.

The reality of information access is that inforrmation that threatens powered industry (food industry, pharmaceutical industry, etc.) is not easily accessible unless you really dig in.

If anyone reads the retired professor’s “ionized and alkaline water: snake oil on tap” article, please read this as well: http://glowing-health.com/science-and-myths/snake-oil-part1.html
Then you can make your own judgement.

sal
February 4, 2010

FOR ALL YOU NAYSAYERS OUT THERE- do you think the american people are stupid? do you think they would just say, “ok here is $4,000.00 send me an ionizer?” of course not. enagic reps give the water to people for a week or two, FREE OF CHARGE, and when they see a difference in their body (and let me say this again for the naysayers and frustration ex- enagic reps who couldnt be successful in the business and have to resort to bashing the company) and when they see a difference in there body do they buy one. let me ask this, how many people on this blog would shell out $4000.00 for something without trying it first. can anybody be that stupid. of course not. could the naysayers on here be that stupid? of course and they are!!

way of the samurai
June 28, 2010

I agree with the scientist.

All of you don’t know a thing about this topic.

As for the “Korean”, anyone can post a fake korean name.

Mark in Boynton Beach
August 17, 2010

My wife and I are testing our health on Iceland water that is found at walgreens and Vitamin Shoppe. One says ph 8.8 and the other also is at 8+. If it does well we might get an ionizer and they do make good ones in the $500-750. Those that are quick to jump/attack on the $4k model are picking a low fruit because that unit is sold through a pyramid sales method. OK…why are we testing out alkaline water. I have been grasping at all sorts of advice since my wife got stage 4 breast cancer. Through light chemo and lots of supplements suited for cancer we are rid of cancer in all 3 places in her body. So we are laser focused on making sure it will not come back. Our first run in with ph was a nurse that said her mother had cancer and it never came back because she had a daily drink of a teaspoon of baking powder and honey everday 1/2 before breakfast. I laughed inside because my wife was taking high advanced medicinal mushrooms and beta glucan…etc But I kept stumbling on testimonies that were similiar…some using baking powder and fresh lemon juice. Its got overwhelming as people all over talk about making their bodies more alkaline. One guy in the office actually 5 yrs ago measured every friend and relative with the saliva litmus test. Everyone that was 6.0 or worst eventually got a disease. I also read that kids absorb minerals so well like Mg, Ca and potassium that they are always 7+ on saliva tests….sure enough my young kids were all dark green or 7.2+. I was sitting at ph 6.5 along with my wife. So far the iceland water is working along with healthy eating and we are moving up the scale. Hope this helps…get the yellow litmus tests for 5 bucks…test your sick aunt, the healthy barley grass hippie, the kids and the family, one column being your estimate of their health and then the ph reading of their saliva when not drinking/eating for an hour…no doubt you will see a trend.

rev liz
October 23, 2010

I would like to hear more from the way of the samurai. That person made 2 solid points. I’ve recently been approached to buy th 4K ionizer. I read the material & it actually stated that their product wasn’t any better than another brand they were doing the comparison with, rather, they stated that the cost was so high so they could pay their agents the commission because of it being a MLM company. I agree if one works with raw food as much as possible and when cooking food, make sure you know what ingredients are going into your food and possibly the source especially when it comes to the meat department. In other words, cook from scratch whenever possible. Deep breathing & meditation also helps the cause as well. When your mind, body & soul are in sinc, it’s all good. Taking care of self first, should be the priority. Keep it simple. I have a friend that takes a teaspoon of Certo powder to maintain his Ph level.

JASON
May 9, 2011

Doctors- The True Snake Oil Peddlers
I believe that The medical profession knows the answers and the cures or preventions of most diseases. I further believe that rather like the clergy tried to protect their profession it clearly would not be good business practice for a GP to suggest to his patients that a small number of lifestyle changes may cure their problems. 
When my daughter was 18 months old she developed severe eczema on her arms and scratched the area until it bled. A visit to the doctor resulted in an offer of steroid cream. Disgusted we tried more natural alternatives including soya milk within DAYS the eczema went and has never returned.
18 months ago at 12 she developed severe acne on her back and face. A visit to the doctor resulted in an offer of a prescription for tetracyclin and benzoyl peroxide based cream( medical research is amazing as these same two products were prescribed to me repeatedly 30 years ago, without any improvement.)
Over the last 18 months her skin condition has got no better or worse, she is soon to be 14. 3 weeks ago I read about the wonders of salt and mixed a saline solution with cooled boiled water and sea salt. Within DAYS her skin has been transformed.
My younger son was rush diagnosed with ADHD, after 18 months of pressure this diagnosis was overturned and he has returned from the drug induced zombie that Ritalin made him to the happy bouncy  by nature (never in trouble ) boy I remember pre medical interference. 
The human body is a very complex machine and yet big food and pharmaceutical companies push on us ever more ludicrous processed foodstuffs. We must accept this rubbish and never question the motives behind the bizarre combinations of ingredients. But whenever a potentially positive product such as a water ionizer is touted as the next life enhancer MD`s( backed by corporate machines ) are sent out to destroy the competition.

admin
May 9, 2011

Jason this comment gets a standing ovation from me! Thank you so much for stopping by and expressing your thoughts so well.

mike in Austin
August 1, 2011

Good stuff.
Reading the comment from Mark in Boynton Beach about the use of baking powder and citrus reminded me of alka-seltzer.  It contains citric acid and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and their reaction together causes it to fizz.  I wonder if popping a couple of those each day would increase your ph over time.  A big box of em from Costco would be a lot cheaper than a new ionizer.

Leave a comment

WP_Big_City