Education is no cure for stupidity and ignorance

High-profile Bay Area denizens are skipping tap water in favor of drinking unfiltered, untreated, and expensive “raw” water that comes straight out of the ground, Nellie Bowles reports for The New York Times. Proponents claim that raw water’s health benefits include naturally occurring minerals and microbes. But the reality for any inadequately treated water from the tap or a spring is that those minerals can sometimes include arsenic, and those microbes can be deadly.

In an Instagram story posted late Tuesday night, Evans announced from a location deep in the Marin County forest that he was “about to embark on a minimum of a five-day water fast,” as The Outline’s William Turton first noted on Twitter. Evans then showed off his spirit guides on this aquatic journey: several two-and-a-half galloons jugs of Fountain of Truth “fresh raw spring water,” priced at an incredibly fair $15 a piece (or as a little as $11 if you buy 20 jugs at a time) with an also very reasonable deposit of $22 per jug.

The New York Times reports that Live Water, which costs more than five dollars a gallon, is often sold out in one natural-foods store in San Francisco’s Mission District. Live Water’s founder – who changed his name from Christopher Sanborn to Mukande Singh – claims that public tap water is “toilet water with birth control drugs in them.”

The company also claims its water is “probiotic,” or promoting of intestinal flora. That is likely true in a broad sense – the water turns green if it’s not consumed within a month.

Another concern of raw water boosters is flouride. One proponent interviewed by the Times described the effective anti-cavity treatment added to most municipal water supplies as “a deathly toxic chemical.” A startup called Zero Mass Water promises to protect drinkers from that danger by drawing water directly from atmospheric moisture. The Times reports that it has raised $24 million in venture capital.