Scientologist-run companies are so predictable!
The founder of the company is a lawyer by background, who couldn’t meet the Lionel Hutz ethical standard.
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I thought it was there to suck up vegetable farts?
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It’s surprisingly easy to mess up the process of putting tap water into a bottle, and sometimes it happens at the worst possible time:
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Maybe they decided to market Real Raw Alkalized Water?
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Now available in 70s retro with DMSO and laetrile.
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It never ceases to amaze me when people manage to fuck up the recipe for the most common chemical compound on the surface of the planet.
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Is it the alkalinity as such? Or is it the particular chemical they added to make it alkaline? uh, Im not advocating “for” alkaline water, just that I would imagine different chemicals have differing effects on the body. Clearly, abuse of KHCO3 can cause liver failure. This chemical is used as baking powder, so it’s generally safe. But perhaps the children were drinking only this water, for years, and it was overloading their small metabolisms.
It might be quite a trick to find any (unneeded) chemical that you could take, for years, in quantity, (besides water) and have it give you no unwanted side effects.
Really, it should say “Potassium Bicarbonate solution”…
And it comes with a spray nozzle? So you can spray “water” in your “water”?
They don’t even tell you how much KHCO3 is in it! Or the pH of the solution itself.
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Pretty much every food has been contaminated and killed people. Tylenol has too. The issue of whether alkaline water has any benefits and whether its boosters are idiots should be separated from this occurrence, or come the next e coli scare we’re shaming Popeye for having touted spinach.
That seems like a non-sequitur to me. There are no “benefits” to contaminated products that favor contamination.
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What the hell—one of the products they sold is billed as “water concentrate?” As in “just add water” water?
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Popeye’s doesn’t claim that their spinach cures cancer or whatnot.
Also, Popeye’s presumably maintains a written list of what ingredients are used to prepare their dishes.
The company didn’t even have any documents of the ingredients and manufacturing process for the water products it made, which could—among other things—help ensure that excess amounts of ingredients weren’t added or environmental contaminants didn’t get in. There was “no written process control and/or supply-chain control procedures to ensure that the correct type and amount of chemicals are added to each batch of product water,” the DOJ said.
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That’s been on the market for decades but I’ve never heard of it causing a problem before.
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It would also be…deeply unsurprising…if savings were realized by sourcing reagents sold for bludgeoning swimming pool water into compliance, or similar not-terribly-purity-critical applications and using them for safety critical purposes.
The odds that someone would drink something sufficiently alkaline to toast their liver without noticing are a little long(the sensation of your mouth actually turning to soap is, one assumes, quite memorable); but the odds that the stuff that you buy at the pool supply store treats including some nasty algicide as a feature…
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It’s telling that the victims were mostly children, who had smaller livers, and less capacity to filter out all the excess potassium being thrown their way. Also, they might have been hit by a “hot” batch of water that had an excessive dosage of KHCO3.
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Also from Ars:
Last, the company claimed to the DOJ that it used a “proprietary ‘ionizer’ apparatus to apply an electrical current to this mixture, which allegedly creates positively-charged and negatively-charged solutions. [The Joneses] then discard the positively-charged solution and store the negatively-charged solution.”
I hope they’re disposing of all those excess protons in a responsible manner.
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Inevitable punning ensues? Please? Go heavy on this, mutants.
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Hah, these rubes will follow any questionable health tips…
I guess revcontent probably hasn’t killed anyone yet
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i don’t see anyone here saying people should stop drinking water. it’s the manufacturer that’s to blame.
the fact the company was touting their water as a special heath product - devoid of fact - indicates their scammy nature, which indicates by proxy their shoddy manufacturing process
my recommendation always is: don’t trust anyone - including a food manufacturer - when you already know they’re lying to you
awww. miss you gem spa.
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Presumably via a different front that touts the benefits of positively charged water.
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