Is there a “fourth phase of water”? From time to time you might see people talking up the health benefits of so-called hexagonal water, or structured water, or exclusion-zone water.
A few weeks ago Kourtney Kardashian’s Poosh website was spruiking a US$2,500 “structured water filter”. Last weekend even Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald got in on the act, running a now-deleted story on the virtues of “structured water”.
WTF @smh? If you can’t spot that this is pure snake oil from a kilometre away, you should not be in the business of ‘reporting’, let alone ‘science reporting’. Disgraceful. https://t.co/mbcMrA2Gs5
— Stuart Khan (@stukhan) July 30, 2022
So what’s going on?
As a professor of chemistry, I can tell you “EZ water” is nonsense. But let’s talk about what it’s supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to work.
What is EZ water?
EZ water has its origins in observations by Gerald Pollack, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington. He was studying the behaviour of water near “hydrophilic” surfaces, which are made of materials with a very strong attraction to water.
Pollack found that water pushes away objects such as plastic microspheres, salt and even dye molecules from the region close to a very hydrophilic surface.
Pollack’s explanation for this behaviour is that the structure of water changes in the “exclusion zone”.
While water molecules…
