Meet “raw” water – ludicrously priced unfiltered water with random bacteria

The thing is that there will be people wanting to defend this product. It will become just another thing like 'natural salt' that has no added iodine but has lots of impurities in it. This is then packaged as 'non GMO' and 'Gluten Free' amongst other organic things.

As a regular user of a bread making machine I do wonder if my bread would be improved by the use of this posh salt rather than the table salt I normally use. Would I live longer by not having the anti-caking ingredient added to the teaspoon of salt I use with my bread?

So, after a push of a button and a couple of minutes exactly measuring flour, water, salt, sugar, butter and yeast I get perfect fresh bread. Meanwhile, the mystery individual 'ms Ancedote' goes the whole hog on using overly-good ingredients to make some 'even better bread'. This will be using wholemeal organic spelt flour instead of regular strong wholemeal flour, this will also be measured in 'cups', not weighed. So all the other ingredients are fancy, e.g. the salt, the oven will need to be on for hours and lots of noises and mess will be made. Net result is essentially unrisen bread, the science not understood, the interior still sticky dough, the outer with a thicker and dryer crust than one might want. To my science mind this is madness, a lot of work with ingredients coming from all four corners of the globe, just for some bread that is wrong. All kinds of exciting herbs and what-not could also be added, such 'rustic' fun is the desired thing, it does not taste like store bought bread and that is what matters. The fact it takes five hours to make is part of it. None of it makes sense until you learn the word 'orthorexia':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa

So my mystery friend that makes awful bread and does not want to be making normal bread like I do, why is this? It is just one symptom of a bigger thing going on, orthorexia.

I would say there is a whole industry going on around orthorexia and that these guys are tapping into that market.

I take your point, but, we have a long case history of what happens when we don't have clean water, starting here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb... (well it started before that, but this is when epidemiology became a thing.)

safe water doesn't need to be sterile. In the UK, you are allowed a certain level of "harmless" bacteria. However there are strong laws that are _enforced_ to make sure that people don't get harmed.

Now, there _might_ be a case that "raw" water provides/boosts/promotes certain gut flora in people that is beneficial. However gut flora is a new and little understood science. Applying occam's razor to declining health in the US, and I'd point to two things:

1) increasingly sedentary lifestyle

2) Terrible health system that denies basic care for >60 million people and pumps the rest full of narcotics.

Unlike the gut flora theory, there is a mountain of evidence to back it up, not some bearded weirdo with little connection to the real world.

This "toilet water" part really reminds me of the movie Idiocracy...

The problem with things like sedentary lifestyles is similar to the problem with internet correlations, which in either case imply the same thing. Compare the US to other nations experiencing similar problems and it's reasonably clear that whatever our issue is, it's unlikely because of lifestyle changes alone. Other similarly well developed nations with lackadaisical lifestyles don't suffer the same problems, yet impoverished nations such as those in the Pacific isles do. And in many cases, the problems are confined by our invisible borders. The Czech Republic is a good example there. Bordered by Poland, Germany, Austria, and Slovakia. Czechia is rapidly approaching problem levels, its neighbors are not.

There's a great distance between cholera and less filtered water. Worldwide the high end estimate of cholera deaths is 130,000 and that is with liberal modeling of unreported deaths. A quick search informs [1] that about 2 billion people a year rely on water that is absolutely contaminated with feces. That's a 0.0065% death rate at the high end. Usage of isolated or private water sources along with basic testing can trivially reduce these risks down to 0. And on that note of giving context to numbers, we should look at things like the opioid epidemic. In the US in 2015 about 15,000 people died from all opioids. Even if we assume that it was 0 before, which it was not, that would not explain the ongoing decline in life expectancy. The real reason is mortality rates from a wide array of diseases including 8 of the top 10 killers, heart disease in particular, continue to rapidly grow alongside our unhealthfulness. And that was after they had been in decline for decades.

[1] - https://www.compassion.com/poverty/water.htm

#CholeraDetox2018.