Water Faces Existential Threat As Diet Drinks Prove Equally Good At Not Making Us Fat
After four billion years of resting on its laurels, the prehistoric beverage finally faces a serious competitor in the weight loss market.
For four billion years, water has run an absolute monopoly on the crucial business of keeping biological matter from turning to dust. It just coasted on a transparent appearance and a total lack of flavour. But a new two-year trial of 493 adults has finally threatened the liquid. The results are clear. Diet soft drinks maintain our weight just as well as plain water, a substance that has essentially gotten a free ride since the dawn of complex organisms.
This parity is a problem for the prehistoric beverage. Water has held us hostage for millennia. We drink it simply because it was the only option around that didn’t immediately rust our internal organs or cause us to spontaneously combust. It built an empire entirely on biological necessity. And it made zero effort to improve its recipe since the Cambrian explosion.
The new competition actually tries. Diet soft drinks did what water never bothered to do by adding complex chemical sweeteners and brown dye, proving that the human body is frankly exhausted by millennia of drinking something that tastes exactly like the glass it comes in. A zero-calorie cola apparently gets the exact same level of metabolic respect as the primordial soup of our ancestors.
“You cannot wash a family car with diet cherry cola without attracting wasps.”
Academics are taking the shift seriously. Professor Barnaby Slake is the chief hydration theorist at the Institute for Liquid Studies. He thinks water has become dangerously complacent by relying on a historical reputation as the source of all life instead of innovating to meet consumer demands. Slake notes that water was busy falling out of the sky for free while diet soda was in a laboratory. The soda figured out how to mimic the sensation of drinking fizzy static electricity.
So the threat to the market leader is literal. Water has no branding. The advertising team doesn’t exist, and its traditional packaging in random puddles leaves a lot to be desired when a beverage born from industrial chemistry matches the performance of the substance making up 60 percent of the human body.
The water industry is panicked. I reached out to water for comment on Tuesday. I received no response beyond a drip from a faulty kitchen tap. An anonymous representative for the Global Consortium of Puddles and Reservoirs did release a statement to my office anyway. “Water still provides excellent value for money, but please remember that you cannot wash a family car with diet cherry cola without attracting wasps,” the spokesperson said.
Retaliation might take time. Water could attempt to rebrand. It might introduce new features to compete with the synthetic options on the market, like trying to be slightly more effervescent or at least less prone to freezing at zero degrees Celsius. Until then, we finally have a choice. We are no longer beholden to simple H2O. The unchallenged age of water is over.