Getting the skinny on diet water

utterzube.com - While researching Complete and Utter Zebu, we came across a Japanese produce called Diet Water. We found hilarious the idea that special water could help you lose weight more quickly than the ordinary stuff. After all, water doesn’t actually contain any calories. Japan, however, is famous for having products that seem utterly bizarre to us but which never appear in stores over here.

Then somebody pointed out to us that something similar has arrived in the UK. It’s called “Bio-Synergy Skinny Water”. The Skinny Water website claims it is:

“A low-calorie water, enhanced with a unique combination of ingredients to help (YOU) lose and maintain YOUR weight.”

Apparently, the “unique formula combining L-Carnitine and Chromium assists natural fat burning and helps reduce sugar cravings” although, as it taste of pomegranate (there are other flavours too), it sounds as though it must contain some form of sweetener, which might explain why it reduces the sugar craving. You are supposed to drink up to four bottles of it a day as well as a bottle 30 minutes before each meal “to block carbohydrates.”

We aren’t scientists but it strikes us that drinking seven bottles of any sort of fluid is likely to make you feel so bloated you’d have trouble moving let alone eating as much food as usual. The fact that Fergie of Black Eyed Peas endorses it does little to convince us:

” Skinny Water. With a name like that it has to be good, right?”

If anyone knows more about how sound the scientific claims for skinny water are, please let us know. Given the news that a man who was almost blind in one eye has cured himself with a marigold supplement, perhaps we’re being unduly skeptical.

The generally-held belief that you should drink eight glasses of water a day is debunked in a new book Don’t Swallow Your Bubblegum; this doesn’t take into account the water you absorb from drinks, fruit and veg. It’s also not true that eating at night is more fattening; it’s quantity, not time, that counts. Nor is it the case that men think of sex every seven seconds; as the authors point out, that would be getting on for 60,000 times a day, making it hard to achieve anything.