Debunked Hysteria of the Day: The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and several other heavy-breathed British publications would have you believe that the European Union has just ruled that water cannot prevent dehydration.
Well, it has. But the ruling is not nearly as ludicrous as it is being made out to be.
First, a little background: A pair of German scientists, Drs. Andreas Hahn and Moritz Hagenmeyer, submitted an ostensibly irrefutable claim [pdf] to the European Food Standards Authority — that drinking water “can reduce the risk…of dehydration” — in order to prove that EU laws preventing food manufactures from labeling products with health claims not approved by the EU were too strict.
Here is why this is not a repeat of “pizza is a vegetable”:
For one thing, as Guardian science writer Martin Robbins points out, merely drinking water doesn’t prevent dehydration. “If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I’ll still end up dehydrated,” says Robbins, “and if I drink several bottles today, that won’t prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow.”
Bottled water manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to claim on their packaging that their products prevent dehydration because that’s simply not true.
Another thing worth noting is that the only two people outside the scientist behind the claim quoted in both the Mail and the Telegraph articles, Tory MEP Roger Helmer and UKIP MEP Paul Nuttall, are known Eurosceptics with a fairly obvious agenda.
The EFSA did rule that “drinking water is good for normal physical and cognitive functions and normal thermoregulation,” which was good enough for the British Soft Drinks Association.
TL;DR: Sometimes you have to read a little bit more to get the whole story.