Hey, have you tried the puddle water?

Taking an unfiltered look at emergence of the raw water movement.

Live Water (rhymes with hive) is a brand built out of the latest packaged water trend: raw. The idea is to drink the stuff straight out of the ground—just as great, great, great, great grandpa did on his way back from tending the fields.

They call it raw water, wild water, or as some nay-sayers put it, sewer water.  

The trend is capitalizing on the successful raw food movement that took hold years back. It’s also a stance against the status quo of common chlorinated and fluoridated tap water, and overly-refined and overly-filtered bottled water.

Mukhande Singh (born Christopher Sanborn) is founder of the Live Water brand and a spokesperson on his website states, “We are not any more adapted to refined H2O than we are to refined carbohydrates.”

Singh is convincing more than a few with this video on his website with memorable quotes like “Water is so much more than H2O.” and then romancing the healthy probiotics and microbes we need. Raw believers today are buying 2 gallon jugs for as much as $60. That's $1.88 a cup! For water!

On the other side, Dr. Zubin Damania has posted a video that claims the fad is unscientific, capitalist opportunism, or as he puts it, “a bunch of crap.” He warns of water-borne disease in raw water, and sings praises for the treated tap water of today—it has “saved millions of lives.”

Andy Zeisler had this to say on Twitter: “raw water” is the whitest thing I’ve seen today and I was just at an IKEA in Portland.

If you’re willing to give this stuff a shot, you can order Summit Spring Raw Water on Amazon if it’s available. Assuring the curious, Summit writes the “source quality exceeds every State and Federal guideline for drinking water straight from the ground.”

Hmmm. Don't you find the ending phrase "from the ground" a heavy qualifier? The mere mention of “ground” evokes the 5 second rule. And this stuff has been laying around for centuries.

So, what do you think? Does raw water have merit? Or is it marketing vapor?