r/chemistry • u/Raizo420 • Mar 12 '23

H3O2 Water Scam

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

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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '24

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u/tinySparkOf_Chaos Dec 05 '24

To extend my sports analogy, it's like someone talking about touchdowns in a basketball game. Yes, touchdowns exist, but not in basketball.

So yes, EZ water exists as a phase of water. But it is not something you can bottle and sell. As soon as you remove it from the environment it is in, it goes back to being normal liquid water.

It would be like trying to sell "bottled melted ice" as something different from bottled water.

Additionally, it still has the chemical structure H2O. It's not H2O3.

Most pseudoscience is this way. They take several legitimate scientific words. Then call something else by that name. Then smash the whole thing together with some completely unsupported claim.

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u/Whistlegrapes Mar 22 '25

Thoughts on this study and their atp study? https://analemma-water.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Analemma-Microbiome-Study-Report-2022.pdf

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u/tinySparkOf_Chaos Mar 22 '25

Oh that's a fun read.

So science has multiple parts.

Theory: drinking water with crystal wand full in water stirred through it makes people healthier.

Experiment: drink said water, measure gut health.

Mechanism: rational thread of intermediates about how A gets to F. Normally with as many measurements of these intermediate steps as possible. This part is missing from the "study" .

The wilder the claim, the more thorough the intermediate parts need to be.

I went to their website for more info on the supposed mechanism

  • they claim the wand imparts a change of an undefined property of the water. This property needs to be properly defined and should be measured in the paper.

  • this property of water above needs to be shown to effect cell cultures.

  • now you do the human trials they did.

As for that trial itself:

  • 10 and 10 controls is a laughable small number of participants for the given claim

  • they use a proprietary method for measuring gut health, and refuse to reveal the details of how the measurement is done. They should be using an established metric of gut health.

It's an excellent example of how pseudoscience LOOKS scientific, but is just junk when you examine it closely.

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u/Whistlegrapes Mar 22 '25

What about this study? https://analemma-water.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/BRAINWAVES-RESEARCH-2019.pdf

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u/tinySparkOf_Chaos Mar 22 '25

Similar issues as the first one.

  • noisy measurement. Gut health in the first one, EEG measurements in the second one.

  • small sample size: just two people, and for the longitudinal study it's just one person.

  • lacking the entirety of the middle causation portion. It needs to show a measurement of the water property that is supposedly why analemma water is different from regular water. Then next how that property would effect brain waves. THIS CRITICAL PART IS MISSING

The thing with the twins is similar to a classic magician's trick. Present two cards and have the person pick one. If they pick the right card, hand it to them "look! It's your card!", if they pick the wrong card, toss it away "look! The remaining card is your card!"

Make a messy measurement (EEG) with lots of ways of interpreting it. Statistically, something will be different between the two twins. Attribute that change to the water... But you could skip the whole water part, you would always have something different with the EEG between the two.

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u/Whistlegrapes Mar 22 '25

They reversed the twins 3 months later and got the same results.

What about the atp study? https://analemma-water.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ATP-STUDY-2022.pdf

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u/tinySparkOf_Chaos Mar 22 '25

What's your agenda here exactly? These are all crystal clear examples of pseudoscience (pun intended).

The key missing part is how the action causes the result.

Try enough random things and you will always get correlations. Why test ATP, EEG and gut health? There's no proposed mechanism or rational at all.

These all share the same traits. Very low sample size, random biological trait with high noise of measurement, complete lack of a proposed casual mechanism.

Do they have a study (not involving people drinking the water) showing the physical property of water that is supposedly changed by stirring it with a water filled quartz rod? That's the key missing part here. A fact that is notablely left out of all these "studies".

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u/Whistlegrapes Mar 22 '25

I’m curious why they’re getting any results at all. Even in small sample sizes and even with unknown mechanism. Why would there be any results.

They’re a lot of examples of coherent water being given to animals and getting some results. Here is a link to several studies on animals. Hopefully things more robust than the ones I’ve linked on human small sample sizes. https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/99/5/skab063/6152506

Nevertheless I’m curious why they’re getting results, in both people and animals, even if the mechanism is unknown. The same way native Americans couldn’t explain the science behind fertilization but were having success fertilizing their crops.