I believe in education, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

Over on the Huffington Thing, as my blogging hero Princess Sparkle Pony calls it, there's an opinion piece railing against VitaminWater, which is currently being sued over misleading advertising. I know next to nothing about the stuff, so I decided to snoop around the Interwebs for a while.

It is bottled by a company called Glaceau, now owned by Coca-Cola. The advertising includes a lot of basketball players (Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant and others) and a few years ago had ads featuring the rapper 50 Cent, who is known for his physique as well as his rhyming skills. Besides vitamins and water, it also has plenty of sugar, though only about half as much as Coke, so it could be seen as baby steps towards a healthier lifestyle.

I found this article over at ScienceLine written by Christopher Intagliata, a website maintained by New York University with the stated purpose of science more accessible. The major point made is that several of the vitamins in VitaminWater are completely pointless in a fat-free drink because they are fat soluble instead of water soluble. For example, putting Vitamin D in milk makes some sense because milk has fat content and D is one of the fat soluble vitamins, along with A, E and K. So unless you are drinking VitaminWater to wash down a burger or potato chips (not a recommended meal, by the way), many of the vitamins in the drink for which you paid good money are going to take the quick trip through your body and into your municipal sewer system without stopping over in any of the places in your body where it might have had some nutritional value.

So far, so good. Useful scientific information without a lot of difficult jargon.

Then I read the comments.

Where's teh stupid? You're soaking in it. People love to drink it or somebody told them it gives you cancer. Not one comment in fifty deals with water soluble vs. fat soluble. Just when you think you've read the stupidest comment possible, along comes another comment even more deeply stupid.

In the words of my professor Victor Manjarrez, we don't deserve to survive as a species.