A bit of a rambling excursion to the concept of grounding, though I didn't understand it that way at the time. Not at all related to this forum, buh I came across someone personally talking enthusiastically about "structured" water, and showing off a water bottle that they had bought, which had a pattern of magnets around the outside of the water bottle. There was more enthusiasm than scientific thinking, but this person had been sold on the idea that people are positively charged, and that "structuring" water in this way could balance that charge, in some way that wasn't totally obvious from what they were saying. Internally, the engineer in me was both scoffing at the ridiculousness of this pseudo-scientific nonsense, but also storing away a topic that I should look into more deeply before writing off completely.
My initial thought was that this product was simply a kind of de-inonised water. In the sense that most impurities in water are mineral ions, so you could make a case that de-ionised water is more pure, and therefore better for you. Fun fact; I work in an area of engineering that requires very pure, highly de-inoised water, and it's actually ridiculously poisonous. Water is an amazing and unique substance - there are several ways that water is different from anything else in nature, I won't bore you with all of that, but suffice to say that it has an incredible appetite for dissolving stuff in it - take the most obvious example; grind some salt into water, and now you have the basis for sea water; of which there is quite a lot of on this little planet of ours. That salt - formerly a crystalline molecule (and we got quite deep in the woods over salt crystals a while ago) - now separates in to sodium and chloride ions - charged particles that kind of relax apart from each other, and would combine again if you let the water dry off - indeed that is the fundamental process for "making" sea salt.
Anyway - if that's simple enough, you can appreciate the concept that sea water is simply water with lots of different mineral ions, all held in solution, and all with their own tiny electrical charges. Coming back to very pure water for a second - the reason it's so dangerous, is that the appetite that water has for these charged ions is so great, that if you manufacture a quantity of extremely pure H2O - it will act as a hoover for any and all mineral ions it can get hold of... so put your hand in a jar of de-ionised water, and it will suck all the minerals out of your skin. Really quite dangerous, but of course, it doesn't exist in nature, because it would quickly suck enough minerals out of the air and anything it was in contact with until it becomes the complex solution that we think of as "water".
So - it should come as no great surprise, that the very earliest developments of batteries involved metal plates with brine in between them. The very idea of a battery is that if you can arrange to separate a solution of high concentration of ions from a low concentration, then the system will want to come into balance, and if you get the materials right, you can make use of the ions flowing from high to low concentration in the form of an electrical current.
Coming back to that fancy water bottle, my first guess was that it was just a way of selling a scientific-sounding term, but then I started digging into what "structured water" claims to be.
And, it's kind of interesting; the theory is that with the addition of this pattern of magnets, the "structure" of the water is changed into a hexagonal pattern, which is more like what you may find in natural streams, or glacier melt, and is therefore more pure and health positive, giving benefits to immune system and energy etc.
Now - if you sit back and think through everything I started off with about very pure water, and that being totally un-natural, and highly poisonous.. and then think about the quantities of mineral impurities that would likely exist in water that has been trapped in glacial ice for millions of years - you can see how the idea of magnetising the water in some way making it more "natural" and "pure" is deeply contradictory, and a little silly.
Good water really shouldn't be very pure, it just shouldn't contain actively toxic substances in solution, like fecal matter and harmful bacteria - but despite my overall frustration with the major water companies, they have gotten pretty good at filtering out the really dangerous stuff from water. I think there will be a push for better removal of micro plastics from tap water, but that's a whole different story.
So, in my opinion (and in the absence of any evidence I can find) that magnetising water cannot change the structure of a liquid - which by definition has no structure, and that it cannot remove impurities in the form of mineral ions in solution - because otherwise, you could make salt with a cup of water and a magnet - all of this is nonsensical pseudo-science on it's face, except that maybe it's just doing something else...
For example - what else do we know about magnetism - if you were lucky enough to have gone to school while using a Van de Graff generator wasn't considered dangerous, you may know that your hair will stand up on end when you put your hands on one, or that if you rub a balloon on a wooly jumper it will stick to the wall - All of these phenomena are basically the same thing as the charged ions in sea water, except it's now charged ions in air - rubbing that balloon causes positive charges to collect on your jumper - leaving the balloon negatively charged (with an excess of electrons) so that it will "stick" to the wall, like a magnet "sticks" to the fridge.
Thunder and lightning is somewhat similar, in that big clouds rub together and this causes the positive charges to rise to the top, and leaves an excess of electrons on the underside of the clouds - with enough negative charge, the cloud "grounds" to earth by creating a stream of electrons, ripping through the air to the nearest point that will receive them - this we know as lightning.
So - all of that makes sense, right? all these huge visible effects, all on account of different concentrations of charged particles - it's impossible to witness a thunderstorm, and dismiss it all as nonsensical pseudo science -
So, then - this was all bouncing around in my head as I got deeper into the way that we generate energy at the cellular level - the electron transport chain in mitochondria and the redox cycles that feed into it...
Hold on; not so fast, I hear you say...
I should take a moment to try to lay out the basics of these, because it's just too much of a jump to say - lightning and then cellular redox potential - and expect anyone to follow that.
Redox - stands for Reduction and Oxidisation - Literally giving and taking of electrons. If you study this stuff like I do, eventually you have to take on what (NADH & NAD+) means - and essentially they are simply ions, with or without their charge. If you entirely skip the chemistry, and think of these charges as currency - like banknotes, then some of this makes more intrinsic sense - it's just like an economy, with people buying and selling things - those things change hands, and at the same time, those banknotes change hands. It's all very similar; stuff gets made, and a price is paid (by passing a charge as a transaction of energy).
So - a lot of really complex metabolic pathway diagrams can be thought of like a market, with people milling around, and buying and selling stuff. They may be from different guilds - and have preferred trading partners and product types that they deal in, but they all use the same form of currency.
And this is where I'm homing in (mercifully) on a conclusion. That currency, those metaphorical banknotes, are free electrons. Almost all meaningful chemical processes in the complex balance of life, revolve around ions being able to exchange free electrons in order to change one thing into another, and the concept of the "redox potential" in any given cell, so therefore the entire body - is a measure of the amount of banknotes in circulation, if you like, the availability of free electrons that can take part in this process.
Where might we get some of that? you may be asking, and the answer should be obvious by now... The earth itself.
The earth has an abundance of free electrons; that's why we call the part of an electrical system where the positive charge goes, or the safety "drain" for live on a house wiring diagram, or plug - "earth"- it's literally the same thing - no need to invoke any pseudo science whatever - it's all very simple and real. For the purposes of your local electrician, "the earth" is simply defined as a place that can supply an infinite amount of free elecrons.
So - in order for your metabolism to work effectively, it's actually quite important to ground yourself to a source of free electrons - this recharges your batteries, in a very literal sense.
The trouble is, any discussion about "grounding" often talks about walking barefoot through the forest, like the important thing is some kind of communing with our ancestral forebears, or becoming one with the wood sprites - no ... it's all just simple physics - you can get the same benefit by regularly touching the radiators in your house, anything that connects you electrically to "ground" is equally good - but is genuinely a good thing, and not to be dismissed. You cannot have any kind of complex electrical system without a decent ground (have a conversation about grounding with any kind of audiophile if you suspect there is no such thing as poor grounding) and our bodies are just the same. We spend so much time insulated (think about that wool jumper again) that we don't get the natural passing of charge from the earth that we have evolved to need.
Now - to come back to the structured water - my though after all that, is that the magnetic charge simply creates a minor negative charge in the water - that's totally possible... the movement of ions in the water surrounded by a directional magnetic field - yeah, that's totally possible. Not enough to power your phone or anything, but enough that you can claim it as a thing, and sell it, and maybe even enough to make a difference to anyone who doesn't understand what grounding is, and isn't getting enough - it could produce effects on the immune system, and energy levels, all to the point of seeming to justify the claims.
What this all means, is - if someone tells you that you can get all these magical benefits from a fancy water bottle weighed down with a pattern of magnets on the outside - just tell them that there's no need - you have a direct line to Thor himself, and he'll sort it out for you.
