Penta Water

[djerickd]

http://www.pentawater.com/

This stuff sounds promising in theory:

Penta is Simply the Purest Drinking Water You Can Buy

Penta is created through a seven step process that removes all impurities and chemicals. We use micro-filtration, de-ionization, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet to ensure a water that’s pure and clean. Penta is not just purified – it’s pure! Penta water is 100% free of chemicals, solids and other contaminants. Some waters contain arsenic, MTBE, chlorides, chromium 6, trihalomethanes and even dioxins. Not Penta!


Proven More Effective Hydration

Water enters cells through small channels called aquaporins. Large clusters of water can’t fit through these tiny channels. Water often remains outside the cell because the H2O molecules have formed into large clusters that can’t effectively pass into the cell interior. Penta’s small clusters of H2O molecules have been proven by scientists at major universities to be able to more effectively hydrate cells, which is why so many people report that Penta helps them feel great!

Stable Smaller H2O Clusters

In Penta, each water molecule is still composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. There’s no way to change that and still have it be water! What is different about Penta is the way in which the molecules are arranged. Water molecules typically bond with each other to form large clusters and chains. These large clusters are too large to easily pass into your cells, so you don’t get hydrated enough.

High energy sound waves are used to restructure the molecules in Penta water into small, stable clusters. These small clusters are able to more effectively enter your cells. Penta’s unique structure is patented and has been verified in a published, peer-reviewed study conducted by scientists at the General Physics Institute.

I bought a bottle, tastes like regular water, I guess it worked

[daveo]

What's the price per ounce (or per mL)?
What's the price of tap water per ounce (or mL)?

Is it still worth it?

[zamboni]

Sounds like a lot of marketting to me. Anyone heard about how coca cola is getting into a lot of crap because its now common knowledge that dasani is nothing more then tap water?

[Fudgam]

"Pure" water...that stuff is nooooooooo good. If it is truly pure, then that means that all the minerals are removed too. If you drink "pure"/distilled water, its going to leach minerals from your body.

And btw, talk about taking a simple idea and making a mess out of it. I mean....Holy Sh*t! "This isnt just any old water, its gone through reverse osmosis, distillation, fision, fusion, to the moon and back and to your kitchen"

[Bunko]

Sounds like marketing BS to me.

Very interesting on this site (http://www.silksprings.com/PAGES/water_clusters.htm) they say the exact opposite :

The Water Molecules start aligning and pulling to the new Ionic Charge in the Hydrogen, building up large molecules. This creates lower water tension, which allows absorption into the body far more easily.

Btw, they are also trying to sell something, in this case ionized "Silk Springs" water.

[Mahdimael]

Yes, it sounds like marketing BS

Remember: H + H + O

[GM Enthusiast]

Originally Posted by zamboni

Sounds like a lot of marketting to me. Anyone heard about how coca cola is getting into a lot of crap because its now common knowledge that dasani is nothing more then tap water?

I thought that was only in the UK?

[J-Man]

Distilled water is also the purest form. But there again as already said, then there goes the mineral's

[Specialbear]

the minerals go away becuase of diffusion, correct?

[Andrew M]

[color=royalblue]What is different about Penta is the way in which the molecules are arranged. Water molecules typically bond with each other to form large clusters and chains. These large clusters are too large to easily pass into your cells, so you don’t get hydrated enough.[/color]

[color=black]Now that's just nonsense. Pure and simple nonsense.[/color]

Water is water is water. The best I have ever tasted was on my great-uncle's farm. They had plumbed a natural spring so that it came out of a tap in their garden. Simply beautifiul. Ice cold all year round. Tasted almost crisp. I'm sure it was full of minerals, and am sure that removing all the minerals will ruin the taste of water. My lab's distilled water is horrible.

Andrew.

[gravityhomer]

Originally Posted by djerickd

http://www.pentawater.com/

Stable Smaller H2O Clusters

In Penta, each water molecule is still composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

Thank god! wouldn't want to kill ourselves with hydrogen peroxide or something. I'll give you my perspective on this as someone with a few degrees in materials science. The whole point of my field is to know a thing or two about the structure of materials. While I think there is some correct science behind what they are saying there is one big factor which destroys their whole assertion, read below.

Originally Posted by djerickd

There’s no way to change that and still have it be water! What is different about Penta is the way in which the molecules are arranged. Water molecules typically bond with each other to form large clusters and chains. These large clusters are too large to easily pass into your cells, so you don’t get hydrated enough.

So I can't verify the biology rergarding a size restriction on absorbed molecules in the above, but this would be a fair description of the structure of water. Water's structure just like any liquid is amorphous. Meaning that if you choose any one water molecule, it's number of nearest neighbors and second nearest neighbors will be slightly different from the other water molecules. This is not true in a crystalline solid. Every single atom in a crystalline solid has the same number and arrangement of nearest neighbors, second nearest neighbors, third, etc. You think of it like this, a crystal has long-range order, if you know where one atom and its neighbors are then you know where all the atoms in the crystal are. an amorphous material has short-range order, you may have some idea about the location of atoms (or molecules) immediately surrounding a single atom, but you can't say anything about where all the other atoms or molecules are.

Now in an amorphous solid things aren't moving around much at all, evey atom (or molecule) is basically frozen in place. There is some diffusion (moving around of atoms) taking place depending on how high the temperature is, but very little.

In an amorhous liquid the molecules (or atoms) are constantly moving and shifting from one second to another. The water molecule has a dipole moment because of its shape. It is bent. The hydrogen electrons are now mostly around the oxygen giving it a slightly negative charge and the hydrogens (now missing their electrons) have a slight positive charge. This means that water molecules can line up and form clusters based on this very, very weak interaction. A dipole-dipole interaction is far weaker than the coulomb interaction that creates the hydrogen molecule in the first place. The dipole moment interaction is one of the weakest bonds that exhists in nature. It can be easily broken just by the thermal vibrations of the molecules. This is the whole idea of a liquid, the thermal vibrations of the individual components (whether atoms or molecules) is stronger than the interaction between them and therefore the material has no real strength, it just flows at that temperature. The ratio of the interaction strength between molecules and their thermal vibrations would give all different thickenesses of liquids. Which is why some flow very slowly and some don't. Water flows pretty easily, it's molecules are always moving around. At any one time snap shot there is probably a distribution of local clusters and chains of varying lengths due to the dipole-dipole interaction.

Originally Posted by djerickd

High energy sound waves are used to restructure the molecules in Penta water into small, stable clusters. These small clusters are able to more effectively enter your cells. Penta’s unique structure is patented and has been verified in a published, peer-reviewed study conducted by scientists at the General Physics Institute.

Now this also makes sense. Sound waves would definitely disrupt the equilibrium distribution (based on temperature) of local clusters and chains of molecules. Introducing vibrations far stronger than the thermal vibrations that are present would probably break up almost all the clusters and long chains. At most you would have very small clusters still "bonding" from a dipole-dipole interaction. Maybe the smallest size cluster is 5 molecules and this is why they call it "penta" water.

But what doesn't make any sense at all, is that they call these small clusters "stable". I can't think of any reason why once the sound waves are removed the the water wouldn't go back to thermal distribution of clusters and chains that was there before. The water molecules are still all moving around eachother. The pentawater people cannot stop this from happening. The best they can hope for is that it takes a good deal of time for the larger clusters and chains to form. But I can't imagine this being anymore than a few hours at the maximum. What is the expiration date on their water? If it is anything more than an hour I would say it is now regular water that has no memory of ever being subjected to sound waves.

If people want I can look into how many water molecules would move per second based on temperature to see if there is any rationale that it might take like a day for larger clusters to form.

[zamboni]

California has some of the highest quality drinking water in the world. (Supposedly) the water that I get out of my tap is better then most bottled water available. Anyways, thats what I heard sometime ago.

150th post!...I think

[npc314]

At least, if it actually worked as advertised, it would be poison.

To give myself a bit of validity, I'm a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University in Chemical and Biological Engineering. Basically, when I first saw a pamphlet for Penta, I was HORRIFIED that they are so blatantly exploiting science against people to make money. My colleagues all expressed a similar dismay after seeing what Penta had to say.

Penta is 100% marketing BS. As some have pointed out, many scientific laboratories use extremely pure water all the time. It's not that hard to achieve. Our lab uses a triple-pass filtration system.

What *is* hard (actually, impossible) to achieve are any of Penta's other claims. Let's start with the basic structure they have proposed for so-called "Penta clusters."

Originally Posted by Penta pamphlet

After it is purified, Penta is put through the patented Penta process, which uses powerful ultrasound to restructure the H2O clusters to a smaller, stable state.

Water molecules (consisting of two small hydrogen atoms and one larger oxygen atom) can be visualized as little Mickey Mouse heads--a round face (oxygen) and two ears (the two hydrogens). Water is a liquid at room temperature (rather than a gas) mostly because its molecules interact with one another so strongly. Essentially, the oxygens all have a partial negative charge (called a dipole) and the hydrogens have a partial positive charge. This makes the Mickey Mouse ears attracted to the face quite strongly (opposites attract) in one of Nature's strongest non-covalent bonds, the hydrogen bond. (I realize gravityhomer has stated previously that these are temporary dipole interactions and are quite weak, but hydrogen bonding is the prevalent intermolecular force in water.)

So imagine this: water's structure is dominated by Mickey Mouse ears against Mickey Mouse faces. Faces don't like to be next to faces because that would be having like charges together and they would repel. Penta's 5-molecule clusters are always depicted as having FIVE Mickey Mouse faces all crowded together, with the hydrogens (ears) all pointing outward from the center of the cluster. (This depiction is on every bottle and is on the upper left-hand corner of their website www.pentawater.com as part of their logo.) This is an EXTREMELY unstable arrangement of water molecules. Even if sonication (basically what a Phillips Sonicare toothbrush would achieve if you switched it on in a sink full of water) were to impart enough energy to rearrange water into such ridiculously unstable clusters, they would be extraordinarily transient. That is, they would immediately break apart (in about 1/1,000,000,000,000th of a second, called a picosecond) and disorganize back into water's ordinary, haphazard ear-to-face configuration.

Penta, as proposed, goes against the thermodynamic laws of the universe. Furthermore, changing something at the molecular level has much bigger implications than simply changed hydration (more on hydration later).

Let me take, for example, carbon. If you arrange carbon atoms in one way, you get graphite (essentially, charcoal). But if you rearrange the carbon atoms in graphite into a higher-energy, less stable form (a real-life analog to Penta's fictitious transformation) you get *diamond*. My point is that rearrangements of molecules at the molecular level have huge effects on how that material looks and behaves. Penta water would probably not even look like regular water if it had been rearranged so drastically.

Lastly, I'd like to address Penta's claims that their water hydrates cells so thoroughly. There is a graphic in their pamphlet (and probably on their website) that shows shriveled-up cells surrounded by big, disordered clusters of water. These are compared to taut, hydrated cells surrounded and filled with small Penta clusters. This graphic is, simply put, a total crock.

First of all: biology has evolved over MILLIONS of years to regulate the rate at which water enters and exits cells. Some cells (like blood cells) don't do this so well, so that if you put red blood cells into pure water, they explode thanks to osmosis. This is why red blood cells are surrounded by a liquid that has a similar amount of salt in it as the liquid inside the cells. That way, there is no net osmosis and the cells neither shrink nor explode. The idea here is that there is a balance to how the body works that is not easily upset. Were Penta actually able to enter cells more easily, your cells would all bloat, some would probably explode, and it would probably kill you. Especially if it made cells turgid as is shown in the pamphlet's illustration.

Folks, water is water. That's right: PENTA IS JUST WATER. There's no reason to pay so much for something that is so plentiful (it comes out of your sink for goodness' sake!).

[imsuxok?]

So could Penta be sued for false advertising? Class-action ahoy!