Today I Learned

Americans wouldn't know about it, but Ribena is a popular (blackcurrant) fruit drink in much of the world, produced by GlaxoSmithKline. For decades they advertised how it was high in vitamin C, until in 2007 some school kids in New Zealand were doing a project to show how it was healthier than cheaper brands, when they found out that it contained no vitamin C.

This 1975 internal memo really sums it up:

"Our current posture with respect to the sponsorship of talc safety studies has been to initiate studies only as dictated by confrontation. This philosophy, so far, has allowed us to neutralize or hold in check data already generated by investigators who question the safety of talc. The principal advantage for this operating philosophy lies in the fact that we minimize the risk of possible self-generation of scientific data which may be politically or scientifically embarrassing."
- G. Lee, a J&J applied research director, "strictly confidential" memo from March 3 1975 to Dr. D.R.Petterson & Dr. B. Semple, managers of the baby products division regarding Management Authorization for Talc Safety Studies

More gross memos in this 2018 J&J Reuters investigation: "Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder"

Reading about Real Water poisoning people with hydrazine recently threw me for a loop... Source

After traditional filtration methods:

Then potassium chloride is added and the water goes through a proprietary "ionizer" apparatus to apply an electrical current to the water. This allegedly created positively charged and negatively charged solutions. Real Water employees would discard the positively charged solution and keep the negatively charged solution.

That initial batch of negatively charged solution would then go through the "ionizer" apparatus and be separated again. The resulting negatively charged solution would then be treated with potassium hydroxide (a form of lye), potassium bicarbonate (sometimes used in baking powders), and magnesium chloride (a salt used in nutritional supplements and for de-icing roads); this formed an "E2 concentrate" product, which, when diluted, formed their alkaline water product.

The FDA identified hydrazine in product samples it tested. In the trial, Issam Najm, an environmental engineer who specializes in water chemistry and testing, testified that the hydrazine likely formed in the "ionizer," which was just titanium tubes electrified with what looked like jumper cables used to charge a car battery. Najm testified that, in the charged water, nitrogen gas naturally found in air could have reacted with water to form hydrazine (N2H4), or, during the electrolysis, ammonia (NH3) was formed first, before reacting with hydroxide to form hydrazine.

According to Kemp, Real Water never tested for hydrazine, and the meters (made by Hanna Instruments and Milwaukee Instruments) the company used to test alkalinity were allegedly inaccurate, leading Real Water to produce yet more concentrated forms of its product than it thought.

"These people were outrageous," Kemp said. There was "no safety testing, no analysis of the product to see what was in it." He said that the person who developed the water treatment process for Real Water bought the titanium tubes "from some Russian guy in the '80s" and spent four to five months making alkaline waters in his garage, working until he had a formula that didn't make him vomit or have diarrhea.

It makes me think of the irradiated water that was marketed for "vigor!" and bogus cures in the 20s. Still too much snake oil and pseudoscience...