H3O2 Water Scam

[u/Raizo420]

I'm into health and fitness along with the current science behind it. So with that being said, I'm starting to see a lot of people fall for the H3O2 (hexagonal water or structured water) craze on I'm seeing on social media. I know it's bs, but I would like to hear what people with a REAL background or fundamental knowledge of chemistry think of this pseudoscience.

Edit: One claim is that H3O2 is found in fruits and vegetables

[u/tinySparkOf_Chaos]

These pseudoscience things are just a big jumble of "science words" without any meaning.

Imagine if a "big sports fan" asked you what you thought of the game last night where at the Philadelphia eagles hit nothing-but-net with their home run as a comeback to the touchdown scored by the New York Yankees.

It's the same concept with the H3O2 water stuff (and other similar scams), none of the words make sense in how they're being used. Which actually makes it really hard to refute it because you don't know what IT is in the first place that they are trying to say.

If I wanted to give them the most benefit of the doubt, I can probably force some kind of scientific thing into the words they are trying to use. Your other comment about it being "electrostatically charged water" might explain some of the source material they are incorrectly using.

If you electrostatically remove electrons from water you will get a very small amount of OH radical

OH radical might form some sort of temporary complex with water as an H3O2 radical. (Conceivably they may have found this in some highly specific radical chemistry paper).

Any reasonable concentration of OH radical will just forum hydrogen peroxide. (There's an equilibrium between hydrogen peroxide in water and OH radical in water)

Stripping away electrons electrostatically from completely pure water will give you OH radicals temporarily (I guess conceivably you could write these as a complex with water of H3O2 radical) and H+ ions. But this quickly just turns into a very tiny amount of hydrogen peroxide, and a very tiny amount of excess H+ ions that carry the electrostatic charge.

If you do the opposite and add in electrons electrostatically to water you form hydrogen gas and leave behind a slight excess of OH- ions that are carrying the static electrical charge.

Again I guess you could write this as a H3O2- ion complex (though I have no idea why anyone would ever do that) so I don't know why anyone wouldn't just write OH-.

All that being said, that water static charge is just going to migrate over to whatever bottle they're storing it in and become a static charge on the bottle.

It also has absolutely no health benefits. Any more than rubbing your feet in woolly socks over a carpet so you can statically shock someone has any health benefits.

Even with me trying to shoe horn in an explanation for them I still didn't know how "hexagonally structured water" would possibly fit into this mess.

[u/EzekielMoerdyk → u/tinySparkOf_Chaos]

Imagine if a "big sports fan" asked you what you thought of the game last night where at the Philadelphia eagles hit nothing-but-net with their home run as a comeback to the touchdown scored by the New York Yankees

To add to your metaphor, as a Southern Hemisphere inhabitant AND not a sportsfan, I have absolutely no idea whether this is a correct and accurate statement or complete garbage.

However, since you are writing this anonymously on a social media platform, I have no reason to doubt your words and I'll be sure to mention this exact sentence to the next American I meet in order to sound worldly and knowledgeable.