Currently browsing posts about: Water

Here’s something I haven’t yet written about but I’m seeing so much on the topic that it’s due.

Microplastics are small (5 millimeters and much, much smaller) particles that come off of plastic containers, wrappings, and waste.  They are now everywhere and in everything, including oceans, water supplies, food, animals, and us.

Not nearly enough is known about their effects, but early signs are not reassuring.

Some examples:

Bottled water can contain thousands of particles of nanoplastics, research suggests:  Microplastics, which research suggests could be harmful to human health, are well-known infiltrators of a wide variety of food and beverages. Now, researchers have found that nanoplastics, the even smaller offspring of microplastics, are present in stratospheric quantities in bottled water, unbeknownst to us until now…. Read more

Plastic chemicals linked to $249 billion in US health care costs in 2018 alone, study finds: By contributing to the development of chronic disease and death, a group of hormone-disruptive plastic chemicals is costing the US health care system billions — over $249 billion in 2018 alone, a new study found.

Should We Care That We’re Drinking Nanoplastics? A new study this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science tells us that every bottle of water we’re drinking has hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics….Nanoplastics and microplastics are not innocuous, but their risks are poorly understood. They come with chemicals that can be endocrine disruptors and contribute to obesity.

How Plastic Can Harm Your Health: Plastic is everywhere—even in the foods we eat and the beverages we drink. CR’s [Consumer Reports’] recent tests of nearly 100 foods found two types of chemicals used in plastic, bisphenols and phthalates, in a wide variety of packaged foods.

Everything you need to know about plastic pollution:This year’s World Environment Day – the fiftieth iteration of the annual celebration of the planet – is focusing on the plastic pollution crisis. The reason? Humanity produces more than 430 million tonnes of plastic annually, two-thirds of which are short-lived products that soon become waste, filling the ocean and, often, working their way into the human food chain.

Plastic food packaging contains harmful endocrine disrupting chemicals, study confirms: Many plastic food contact materials – plastics that are used in the processing and packaging of food – contain toxic chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system and metabolism, according to a new study published in Environmental Science & Technology.

Microplastics: In January 2019, ECHA [European Chemicals Agency] proposed a wide-ranging restriction on microplastics in products placed on the EU/EEA market to avoid or reduce their release to the environment. A consultation on the restriction proposal was organised from March to September 2019….The proposal is expected to prevent the release of 500 000 tonnes of microplastics over 20 years.

Comment: We should be looking hard at similar restrictions and at methods for reducing use of plastics and phasing them out. This won’t be easy, as discussed in: Microplastic regulation should be more precise to incentivize both innovation and environmental safety.  Is this one more food issue we need to be worried about?  I think it is.

Christy Spackman.  The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrial Beverage.  University of California Press, 2023. 289 pages.

Food Studies scholar Christy Spackman proves that, yes, an entire book—-and a riveting one at that—-can be devoted to how water tastes, thereby explaining how it can be turned into a bland commodity with its non-taste sold at exorbitant cost.

My blurb for it:

After reading this book, I now view tasting water as just the same as tasting food, and so will you.

Here is a brief excerpt:

The tasting work done by the Nestlé team, and subsequent website and print information, paints a specific form of relationship between environment and corporation. Rather than highlighting Nestlé Waters (and one might say, all bottled water producers) as operating via extractive economies that produce PET bottles that then circulate in the environment for millennia in increasingly small particles—the tasting situated Nestlé as a core protector of the environment. Teaching dégustation meant teaching consumers to prioritize terroir, rather than the entire political economy of bottled water production….the stories that emerge through dégustation prioritize attention to long-standing understandings of the relationship between earth, food, and flavor at the expense of more recent environmental impacts of water exploitation. Attending to terroir makes it is easy to miss that the systems and ways in which bottled water is produced are, like municipal water, deeply technoscientific.

Another one:

Frankly, from a flavor perspective, for many people accustomed to the taste of bottled water, or filtered tap water, the ingestible argument DPR presents is pretty exciting. DPR [Direct Potable Reuse—i.e., reclaimed] water directly from Scottsdale’s Tap 2 completely lacks the green, musty flavors that plague so many water producers in the metropolitan Phoenix region. It tastes remarkably—or eerily—similar to many mainstream bottled water brands with its lack of minerality. Current proposals for integrating DPR into municipal water sources anticipate blending the purified effluent with treated water from the regular source. Once regulatory bodies take the step of allowing DPR, in the near future water will still slightly taste of the rivers, lakes, canals, wells, and aquifers it travelled through. Just less so.

Full disclosure: Christy Spackman is a doctoral graduate of NYU’s Food Studies program and we could not be more proud of what she has accomplished.  Read her book, judge for yourself, and enjoy!

Oxygen nanobubbles?  Oxygen in little tiny bubbles?

For this gem I am indebted to an item I read in NutraIngredients-Europe:

Oxygen nanobubble drink found to enhance athletic performance, study suggestsA new study finds the consumption of an oxygen nanobubble beverage significantly improves the time-to-completion of maximal and submaximal exercises performed by male cyclists…. Read more

I went right to the article.

The study: A Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study examining an Oxygen Nanobubble Beverage for 16.1-km Time Trial and Repeated Sprint Cycling Performance.  Journal of Dietary Supplements. https://doi.org/10.1080/19390211.2023.2203738.

The concept: Athletes need oxygen and water.  Therefore, oxygen-supplemented water should improve performance.

The result: As comparied to placebo, Althletes who consumed the oxygen-nanobubble beverage demonstrated significantly improved performance.

The conclusion:  “An oxygen-nanobubble beverage improves performance during submaximal and repeated sprint cycling, therefore may provide a practical and effective ergogenic aid for competitive cyclists.”

Guess who funded this: “This study was funded by Avrox Technologies Ltd, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, HG3 3SZ. Avrox Technologies provided the experimental beverages but had no role in study design, data storage, analysis and interpretation.

I wondered what the placebo was and whether study subjects could distinguish the drinks.  The beverages:

were supplied by Avrox Technologies in 500 mL individually sealed bottles and consisted of the same solution containing water, glycerol, glycyrrhizin, lecithin and citric acid. Both beverages have similar organoleptic properties, including taste, aroma, and texture. Previous investigations have indicated that the oxygen nanobubble drink consists of a suspension of lecithin vesicles with a modal diameter of ∼100 nm and concentration 7 × 1012 particles/ml.

The authors deal with my question in their discussion of the study’s limitations:

we did not evaluate the success of our double-blind design, therefore, changes in performance might be somewhat attributed to participants’ expectancy of positive outcomes from their belief that they successfully identified the O₂ beverage…Whilst there were no notable differences in taste, texture or appearance of the O₂ and PLA [not spelled out in the study but must refer to the placebo] beverages, we should have assessed blinding via treatment allocation questionnaires to determine whether participant biases influenced results.

Yes, you should have.

I also wonder whether club soda or Pellegrino might have the same benefit?  Or giving water a good shake?

The Environmental Integrity Project reports on The Clean Water Act at 50.  

The EIP was established by former EPA Attorneys to advocate for stronger environmental laws.

Here’s what this report found:

The bottom line: half of US waterways are badly polluted and “impaired.”

The report recommends that EPA do its job and enforce compliance with existing laws, and Congress pass stronger laws.

Advocates: get to work!

I haven’t said much about unusual bottled waters since 2018 when I wrote about bottled ocean water.

2018 was also when I went on The Daily Show to be interviewed by Desi Lydic as the straitperson for her deep dive into “raw water” (surely, the funniest thing I’ve ever done).

Well, you can’t make up these things.

• Karma Water launches CBD Water:  Karma Water – a US brand which Constellation Brands has a minority stake in – has launched Karma CBD Water: the first such beverage in its wellness and probiotic waters beverage portfolio…. Read more
• Shine Water with Vitamin D: That this is about marketing more than health is evident from at least one review: “The brand messaging is where things go a little off track, slamming you with callouts and copy, trying to establish credibility for the drink’s functionality. These include a large green vitamin D callout, a Vitamin D Council “approved” logo, a “developed by physicians” logo, two mentions of their charitable intentions (5 percent of profits — a problem in that most startup beverage companies have zero or minimal profits for a while).
• Psychedelic Water: A friend who prefers to remain anonymous forwarded an e-mail from this company: “We would love to arrange an interview with you and the team of disruptors behind the launch of the first legal psychedelic, mild mood-boosting, hangover-free fun…Psychedelics have been touted in the media lately for the extreme benefits they have on mental health, depression, happiness, mood-stabilizing, and overall general well-being. Psychedelic Water works because it is the world’s first legal psychedelic blend of kava root, damiana leaf, and green tea A leaf extract for an experience like no other.

My only comment:  Really, there are better ways to get CBD, vitamin D, or even high if that’s what you are looking for.  Me?  I’m sticking to plain, ordinary drinking water, sometimes fizzed up a bit.

I am happy to see that USDA’s Economic Research Service is back on the job and recovering somewhat from its forced move to Kansas City.  I was especially interested to see this report: U.S. Food-Related Water Use Varies by Food Category, Supply Chain Stage, and Dietary Pattern.

It has three main conclusions:

• The U.S. food system, which provides the majority of domestically purchased foods and beverages, requires about one-third of the Nation’s total freshwater use.

• Crop production uses over half of the water for food, while later supply chain stages also require a substantial amount of water.

• Freshwater usage varies by the food categories that make up U.S. diets. If the U.S. population were to adopt healthier dietary patterns, food-system water use could substantially increase or decrease, depending on the dietary patterns realized.

Something to consider.  But all this is why PepsiCo is making such a big point about trying to reduce its water use (it takes many gallons of water to make one gallon of a bottled drink).

• PepsiCo to become ‘net water positive’ by 2030: ‘Time is running out for the world to act on water’  PepsiCo wants to become ‘net water positive’ by 2030, meaning the beverage giant will replenish more water than it uses to produce its food and beverage brands…. Read more

Lucas Bessire.  Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains.  Princeton University Press, 2021.

The website blurb for this book says it is “An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America’s heartland.”

Yes, but it’s more than that.  It’s a deeply personal account of the author’s attempt to make sense of and come to terms with his family’s history on land on the plains of Western Kansas.  This land was once occupied—and not all that long ago—by Native American tribes since murdered or driven out by white settlers.  This same land was once watered by rivers from an ancient underground source, but now so depleted by irrigation that it—like the Indians—is threatened by extinction.

The author, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, grapples with his family’s role in this depletion and his own complicity while coming to terms with his relationship with his long estranged father.  I read this book as a history of the great plains viewed through a personal and familial memoir that reads like a novel.

If you are even remotely interested in why farmers on the great plains are not doing more to preserve this essential water source, start here.  It’s revelatory.

…corporate profits are a key part of the aquifer depletion puzzle.  It should have come as no surprise.  The scale of industrial farming is staggering.  Southwest Kansas is home to some of the nation’s largest corporate feeders, beef- and poultry-packing plants, slaughterhouses, dairies, milk-drying plants and hog farms.  More than 2.5 million beef cattle live there in feedlots that handle tens of thousands of animals.  Just across the Oklahoma line, one company processes 5.6 million hogs per year in its plant…Multinational meat-packing companies operhoe slaughterhouses that process several thousand cattle each day.  All are billion-dollar businesses.  They drive farmers’ choices to produce corn, silage, sorghum, or alfalfa.  Their profits depend on aquifer depletion.  In other words, there is a multbillion-dollar corporate interest to prevent regulation and to pump the water until its gone [p. 78].

He documents goverment collusion with absentee corporate landowners who could care less about what happens to real farming communities.  Near his family’s home, “at least 60 percent of the farmland is owned by nonresidents’ [p. 80].

In the 1940s, the supply of water seemed endless and the opportunity to preserve the aquifer was lost.  “Faith in the abundance of these waters put an end to the more sustainable farming techniques tht were beginning to be adopted by the end of the 1930s, as well as the progressive policies that accompanied them.  One historic opening was lost with them” [p. 89]

Nobody talked about what settlers did to the Indians.

We confined the horrors of eradication [of the Indians] to a cartoonish lost world; one that we thought was entirely disconnected from our own.  We did not relate past events to the banal activities of irrigation farming or the way we grew up or the pumping of the subterranean aquifers.  Like the extermination of buffalo and the toxid fogs and the torturous confinement of defiant voices, these events were not openly discussed and their remnants were never tied to the present.  Cordoning them off from conversation meant that their significance was largely blocked from our memories, too [p. 130].

He struggles with these questions:

So where can a true reckoning with depletion begin and where does it end?  With a strategy to update management practices through more precise forms of modeling and expertise?  With the innovation of more-efficient irrigation technology and crop varieties that require more water?  With a sociology that details how agrarian capitalism drains water and wealth from the Plains to enrich investors elsewhere?  With a diagnosis of how this case illustrates White supremacy, toxic masculinity, or the sentiments and logics of settler colonialism?  With a chart of the ways aquifer losss combines with climate chage to make ours an era of planetary ends?  With an optimism that things aren’t really as bad as they seem? [p. 168].

Why care about the Ogallala Aquifer?  “…depletion comes back into focus as one of the wider movements that erode democracy, divide us from one another, and threaten to make exiles of us all” [p. 173].

Bessire points out that everyone knows what could be done, and right now, to reverse the depletion and conserve what remains.  “Examples of success can be found across the Ogallala region, whree farmers from Nebraska to Texas are organizing and leading related efforts to slow decline” [p. 174].

His book is a call for citizen action.  It would be good to take him up on it.

FAO has this eye-catching new teaser for its new report on water and agriculture.  Check out the teaser first.  Its graphics move (the blades on the wind turbinesshow below turn, for example)

Its main point:

Everyone needs to pay attention to water use, and the teaser and the report state the policy recommendations.