|
United States22883 Posts
On November 21 2011 01:03 dibbaN wrote: Funny how people think this is about water not helping against dehydration. It IS about water not helping against dehydration.
Read the article. The purpose of the law is so that food makers can't make unwarranted claims that their products prevent diseases. Two German scientists decided to test it with water being the 'food', and dehydration being the 'disease.'
In accordance with that law, they said it can't be used, which indicates that they're ruling that drinking water does not help prevent dehydration. To back that up, they had a panel of scientists discuss it who "concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control."
This is like meta-posting-before-reading. First people jump on the silly headline without reading the article, then people say "this is about bottled water's false advertising" without reading the article. It's not about a brand or type of water. It's explicitly over whether or not drinking water is beneficial for preventing dehydration, which is the purpose of the initial law concerning foods and claims of disease prevention.
|
United States22883 Posts
On November 21 2011 01:03 Cosmos wrote: would like to point out that it is true, the water doesn't prevent for dehydratation. When you are dehydrated, you cannot rehydrate yourself with only water, you need at the very least water + salt + sugar. Salt and sugar fix the water in your body. Since the companies which sell water usually don't add sugar to it (who would buy it?), their water doesn't really prevent from dehydratation so Europe is extremely smart in rejecting their demand.
Thank you. That's the answer to what I've been asking.
|
First it should be made clear which form of dehydration is meant. Is it isotonic, hypotonic or hypertonic dehydration? Because drinking water is never going to prevent isotonic dehydration (the most common form of dehydration)
|
On November 21 2011 01:05 Blix wrote: The point imho is that "dehydration" is a medical condition. Advertizing about curing and prevention of medical conditions is required to be based on irrefutable facts.
Yes. If they put "<Organisation X> recommends you drink 2L of water a day", that should be fine because it is true and not a medical claim about the product.
--
@Talin
You'd need an overbearing dishonesty police on ads. The current advertising standards authorities (at least in the UK) have very clear cut rules that everyone can agree on the interpretation of.
An ideal economy would be more efficient without ads, but people do not /have/ perfect information so this is not an ideal economy and ads probably do help with that. For example suppose you didn't know any plumbers in your area. The classified ads let you know they exist pretty much. The dishonesty is an unavoidable side effect.
I like to think of advertising as a stupidity tax because, excepting the ad agency premium you pay anyway, people who buy products from ads will be paying more than you to view the same content.
|
On November 21 2011 00:55 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2011 00:51 hypercube wrote:On November 21 2011 00:49 Jibba wrote:On November 21 2011 00:47 hypercube wrote: It's not an issue of freedom of expression. They are still free to say that water prevents dehydration they just can't connect it with advertising their products.
Gotta love when people cry "I'm being repressed" when none of their core rights are involved.
Anyway, obviously I'd prefer a world where anyone trying this kind of BS would get laughed out of business, but as it as I can't get upset over it either way. That's not what this part of the article says. I'm not clear what "that" refers to. Do you mean they were stoped to say that water prevents dehydration outside the context of advertising? It doesn't matter if it's inside or outside the context of advertising. That appears to be a brand neutral statement. It's just a claim for water, not bottled water or spring water or anything else. Is the contention that the claim of " significant amounts of water" can help prevent dehydration a problem? Or is there something else I'm missing on that ruling. I've seen articles disputing the amount of water you need to drink, but has anyone said that not drinking water doesn't reduce your chance of dehydration? Show nested quote +Prof Brian Ratcliffe, spokesman for the Nutrition Society, said dehydration was usually caused by a clinical condition and that one could remain adequately hydrated without drinking water. He said: “The EU is saying that this does not reduce the risk of dehydration and that is correct. Is that the justification they're using?
Following up on your edit, I'm not sure what the exact logic of the decision is. My problem is with using factually correct information in advertising, to create a mistaken impression. E.g. drinking too much water can create overhydration and has apparently caused problems for long distance runners in the past. Of course you're not going to see that in an advertisement, unless mandated by someone.
Or some people might mistakenly believe that you need to drink bottled water to prevent dehydration (when in fact tap water will do just fine). You won't see an advertisement that say that bottled water as well as tap water prevents dehydration.
The statement itself might be true, but the effect of the advertising relies on the fact that some people misunderstand it or unconsciously act on it in an irrational manner. I.e buy bottled water because they created an unconscious association that it's "healthy" even though in many ways tap water works just the same.
There's no doubt in my mind that these kinds of advertising tactics are ultimately harmful. The only question is whether it's worth going after them or we should just ignore it and hope that people are intelligent and informed enough to make up their own mind.
|
But mass amounts of water dehydrate the body due to salt imbalances, so it's not entirely untrue...
|
United States22883 Posts
On November 21 2011 01:11 Zetter wrote: First it should be made clear which form of dehydration is meant. Is it isotonic, hypotonic or hypertonic dehydration? Because drinking water is never going to prevent isotonic dehydration (the most common form of dehydration) So just to make it more clear, Gatorade and Powerade (which contain electrolytes) should be allowed to advertise (isotonic) dehydration prevention, but regular bottled water cannot. Or could water make the claim for hypertonic dehydration.
|
On November 21 2011 01:03 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2011 01:01 hypercube wrote:On November 21 2011 00:55 Jibba wrote:On November 21 2011 00:51 hypercube wrote:On November 21 2011 00:49 Jibba wrote:On November 21 2011 00:47 hypercube wrote: It's not an issue of freedom of expression. They are still free to say that water prevents dehydration they just can't connect it with advertising their products.
Gotta love when people cry "I'm being repressed" when none of their core rights are involved.
Anyway, obviously I'd prefer a world where anyone trying this kind of BS would get laughed out of business, but as it as I can't get upset over it either way. That's not what this part of the article says. I'm not clear what "that" refers to. Do you mean they were stoped to say that water prevents dehydration outside the context of advertising? It doesn't matter if it's inside or outside the context of advertising. That appears to be a brand neutral statement. It's just a claim for water, not bottled water or spring water or anything else. It does to me. The statement is that "water prevents dehydration" (most of the time, anyway). As long as no one is trying to suppress the message itself we're fine. Why does that matter? Are you saying that if you sell bottled water, you can't put "Water helps prevent dehydration!" on the bottle? It's not saying "Bottled water helps prevent dehydration!" If you have medical condition then water does not help prevent dehydration, so strictly speaking the statement is false without additional qualifiers.
Also the point is probably to prevent creation of association that people will make anyway and that is that specifically bottled water is preventing dehydration and tapped one is not. Creating such associations is something I would call half-scam as it is impossible to make exactly worded laws to ban them and they fall just into "aggressive" advertising, but the message is still intended to mislead the reader/consumer by creating false association. There is a thin line between scam and advertising and this message is pretty close to it. So nothing wrong in my opinion with it being banned from the products, you still can say it whenever you want.
EDIT: re-read the article and it seems they really have no hidden motive so ignore the second part of my post.
|
On November 20 2011 23:48 TallMax wrote:While dehydration means not having enough water, if you're dehydrated (not just thirsty, but with the condition of being really dehydrated) you don't just drink a bunch of water, you drink water with different salts (electrolytes) in it, like gatorade, powerade, and the like; otherwise, your body doesn't absorb the water, you just piss it out. While it does seem silly, and they probably should have focused on the difference between thirst and dehydration, there is a reasonable point that they're making: straight up water intake won't cure particularly serious dehydration. If you have a serious situation where someone needs to rehydrate, grab them anything other than just straight up water, otherwise they might even just puke it up: NIH Listing for dehydration
Very good comment explaining exactly what dehydration.
Probably the bottled water does not contain that electrolytes or minerals needed to actually hydrate beside relieving thirst.
|
taken from the comments on telegraph website, 'Bullshit journalism! Come on DT tell the truth! This was all about an admin cock up! I ahate the E.U. but this is crap!
Some idiot in the EU (and there are many of them) filed a report under the wrong rule/regulation and it was rejected until filed correctly!
The EFSA have expalined the problem....
"Among those claims was a claim related to the role of water in the prevention of dehydration filed earlier this year by two German scientists. At the time, the claim had to be rejected by EFSA because it was filed under the wrong legal provision (Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006/EC instead of Article 13). In short, Article 14 deals with diseases and illnesses whereas dehydration was not regarded by EFSA as a disease.
Dumb admin cock up!'
Gotta love crap journalism! Everyone go nuts lol
|
On November 21 2011 01:18 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2011 01:11 Zetter wrote: First it should be made clear which form of dehydration is meant. Is it isotonic, hypotonic or hypertonic dehydration? Because drinking water is never going to prevent isotonic dehydration (the most common form of dehydration) So just to make it more clear, Gatorade and Powerade (which contain electrolytes) should be allowed to advertise (isotonic) dehydration prevention, but regular bottled water cannot. Or could water make the claim for hypertonic dehydration.
They're allowed to do that, only if they can prove it with actual medical research; plausibility is not enough.
|
United States22883 Posts
On November 21 2011 01:22 PoisedYeTi wrote: taken from the comments on telegraph website, 'Bullshit journalism! Come on DT tell the truth! This was all about an admin cock up! I ahate the E.U. but this is crap!
Some idiot in the EU (and there are many of them) filed a report under the wrong rule/regulation and it was rejected until filed correctly!
The EFSA have expalined the problem....
"Among those claims was a claim related to the role of water in the prevention of dehydration filed earlier this year by two German scientists. At the time, the claim had to be rejected by EFSA because it was filed under the wrong legal provision (Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006/EC instead of Article 13). In short, Article 14 deals with diseases and illnesses whereas dehydration was not regarded by EFSA as a disease.
Dumb admin cock up!' Ok, well that pretty much settles it then. ^^
But everyone should read TallMax's post anyways, since there seem to be a lot of people here who still believe water will prevent most forms of dehydration.
|
EU is such a joke! I'm sooo glad Norway is not a part of EU.
|
They did this to prevent false advertisment because drinking water doesn't solve a dehydratation problem.
|
On November 21 2011 01:44 BlitzerSC wrote: They did this to prevent false advertisment because drinking water doesn't solve a dehydratation problem.
It doesnt? :p
|
|
Haha wtf is wrong with people/.
|
On November 21 2011 01:47 dpurple wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2011 01:44 BlitzerSC wrote: They did this to prevent false advertisment because drinking water doesn't solve a dehydratation problem. It doesnt? :p
It doesn't. Dehydration leads to loss of water and is rarely caused simply by lack of water. Cholera, for example, causes dehydration. Drinking water doesn't prevent cholera.
|
Well, nothing says that because you are dehydrated you have a deficiency of minerals in the body.
|
On November 21 2011 01:54 Zetter wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2011 01:47 dpurple wrote:On November 21 2011 01:44 BlitzerSC wrote: They did this to prevent false advertisment because drinking water doesn't solve a dehydratation problem. It doesnt? :p It doesn't. Dehydration leads to loss of water and isn't caused by lack of water. Cholera, for example, causes dehydration. Drinking water doesn't prevent cholera.
What? Being dead is a cause of dehydration. Did you ever see those mummies in egypt? Drinking water also dont help prevent being dead.
|
|
|
|