Highly suggestible drinkers

In the Co-op parking lot today I saw a minivan with a couple of big door magnets advertising Kangen water. “Change your water. Change your life,” they said. I encountered this stuff for the first time last summer, when I stopped in for a little while at a hippie cooperative house down the street.

Kangen water comes from special purification machines that you hook up to your tap. The machine evidently does something to “ionize” the water and make the pH more basic. The water we usually drink, the hippies told me, is too acidic. The dude who had actually purchased the machine and brought it to share with his co-op buddies also said something about the machine making the water molecules smaller (and thus easier to swallow?). 

Sellers of Kangen machines make all sorts of attention-grabbing health claims about their special water. Joint health, immune support, detoxification, anti-cancer, anti-aging, flatulence control—the usual litany. All the hippies assured me it was legitimate. The general consensus was something like, “Yeah, I definitely feel a difference when I drink it.”

A quick google of “Kangen water,” though, will reveal these health claims to be—at best—questionable. The websites are filled with pseudoscientific gobbledy-gook and meaningless graphics. Kangen sellers basically claim that water—that most essential ingredient for life as we know it—is incorrectly structured for our bodies. They don’t just claim that common tap water has junk in it that should be filtered out. Water in general, they say, can be improved upon. How it happened that life got so far on inferior product isn’t mentioned.

The door magnet I saw today also provided this web address: www.drinkkangen.com. Looks like honest business to me. And here’s the real kicker: Kangen machines cost on average three to four thousand dollars.

Yeah. Th-th-th-thousand.

That anyone with wits enough to save that kind of money could be taken in by such obvious snake oil is a genuine marvel. Or maybe it just underscores the ease of getting a credit card in this country. These charlatans must be making sales, though, because some of the sites clearly took a fair amount of time and energy (but not much intellect) to create.

And like I said, I saw living proof of the Kangen sellers’ success just a few blocks down the street. The funny part of it is that the guys drinking it all claimed the water really had an effect. I don’t doubt they believed it. I’ll bet the owner of the minivan I saw today genuinely believes it, too. And they might truly feel something.

But whatever they feel when they drink this miracle water isn’t coming from the water, it’s coming from their minds. It’s just the power of suggestion. They read this falsely esoteric marketing copy telling them the water will give them health and energy, and then when they drink it they work themselves up into feeling healthier and more energetic. They feel it because they want to feel it. 

The magnet I saw today also said, “Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?” Who wouldn’t want to have that problem solved, and who wouldn’t want to believe it could be done with just a little machine that sits on the countertop? It’s almost like modern-day idolatry. People pray to the Kangen machine, and somehow it does seem to actually make things better.

Our thoughts and emotions are so closely linked to how we feel physically that it’s basically impossible to identify the physiological effect of any one food, drink, vitamin, etc. People will swear that drinking kombucha eliminated their sinus issues, or that flaxseed oil in the evening makes it easier to get up in the morning, or that goji berries make it easier to breathe, but it’s unlikely they would claim these things had they been given these foods with no foreknowledge of their supposed benefits. 

I did in fact read just this afternoon a comment from a guy on a health blog swearing that regular kombucha keeps his sinuses clear (after years of problems). Do you think that if he had no idea what kombucha was and you slipped him a regular dose of it mixed in with orange juice that he would feel any difference? Like, “Oh my god, how is it that my sinuses are staying so fucking clear?” I doubt it.

I know from my own experience that the good feeling I get from making healthy choices is difficult to parse into intellectual and physical components. A healthy dinner of, say, a salmon salad does indeed feel good in my body, but there’s also a good feeling from knowing that I made a better choice than if I had eaten a burger and fries, like all those other American schlubs. I feel smart, and a bit proud, and those feelings contribute to the energy I have when I go for an after-dinner bike ride or whatever.

So when I say to someone, “I feel good because I had fish and vegetables for dinner,” I can’t claim that I feel good just because of the magic omega-3s or beta-carotene. I think those things are good to have in your diet (and there’s certainly more genuine science supporting them than there is for Kangen water), but I know that much of what I feel comes from reading health and fitness blogs that tell me I should feel good for eating those things. 

So even on the level of salmon and vegetables versus burger and fries it’s hard to pull out the placebo effect. When you get down to the hyper-specific level of trying to determine the effects of different types of salmon or different growing methods for a certain vegetable (which many people do) it becomes even harder. Are minute changes in a vegetable’s chemistry truly noticeable?

There seems to be good science backing up the health benefits of grass-fed beef, for example. But do I feel a difference eating grass-fed beef regularly versus the conventional stuff? I’m not sure. The health benefits (if true) are only observable over decades. So if I feel a difference on a day-by-day basis, it’s probably more mental than physical.

And yet you could still probably get some people to pay top dollar for grass-fed beef even without presenting credible science supporting it. You could just give it a snappy slogan like “Change your steak. Change your life,” and people would buy it. Tell them a grass-fed steak will make them feel better instantly, and you’d have people saying, “Yeah, I definitely feel a difference.” 

I’ve never seen a seller or proponent of grass-fed beef make any New-Agey, quick-fix health claims like this. They tend to be very moderate in their approach. I’m just trying to point out that the power of suggestion is very powerful indeed. It can even convince people that ionized water is the cure for the common cold. 

It’s sad to see marketers so shamelessly exploiting people’s suggestibility. But I guess it’s also kind of funny to watch the hippies take the bait.