A Glass of Raw Water?

2018 is being called the year of raw preparations and ingredients. But some people take their craving for raw (read: unprocessed) foods rather far. For reasons of taste and, above all, health, they drink raw water. Unfiltered, and therefore perhaps not quite so healthy in 2018 after all.

Apart from among Hollywood celebs, the raw food movement never really gained a serious foothold. Still, we have adopted more from raw foodies into our eating habits than we may think. Who doesn’t occasionally eat a bar of raw chocolate? Or use a spiraliser to make spaghetti from raw courgette? Raw seaweed is going over the ramen noodles, and raw vegetable, meat and fish tartare are even a real hit in the hospitality industry. Raw-milk enthusiasts can also visit milk taps in the Dutch polders for unprocessed milk straight from the cow.

Living water

But it can be even rawer. Raw water, or live water, is a thing in North American health circles. And naturally, especially among health freaks in California, writes The New York Times. Raw foodies believe that any processing of food or drink from nature means a deterioration of that ingredient. Heating, for example, destroys the enzymes and minerals present—and precisely the ones they consider so healthy.

Probiotics

The same applies to water. Thanks to purification methods such as filtering and sterilisation, which the government applies to drinking water, the water loses its healthy minerals, probiotics and algae, while unhealthy fluoride and chlorine are subsequently added. In addition, the water is sometimes transported to consumers through lead pipes. Or bottled after ultraviolet irradiation or treatment with ozone gas.

Raw water is sold over the counter at bizarre prices

That is why tap-water sceptics look for a pure drinking-water source from which the water can be enjoyed unfiltered and unsterilised. Just as Ötzi the Iceman once drank from a mountain stream in the Alps, they ‘hunt’ for raw water in the wild.

Once you’ve hunted down a raw spring, crowdfunding is a good way to bring your own raw-water concept to consumers – with a little help from health conscious Silicon Valley. And in Californian health shops, various raw waters are already being sold over the counter at bizarre prices. Nearly forty dollars for around eight litres of unprocessed water is no exception. In addition to the health aspects, its unspoiled taste is praised, as if it were a natural wine.

Antibiotics

But that failure to process the water is also precisely where the danger lies. Because we no longer live in Ötzi’s time, when industry did not yet dump heavy metals into the water and people had not yet polluted their own water sources with plastic soup and drug-contaminated excretions. In other words: unprocessed also simply means that, alongside beneficial probiotics, quite a few harmful antibiotics, bacteria and metals may be present in the ‘pure’ water. With a real risk of contamination by E. coli bacteria, viruses and parasites. Raw water? I’ll stick to sparkling.