The Telegraph (And the Mail) are two UK-based newspapers with a clear, admitted and unashamed anti-EU agenda. At every level. They like to cater to the lowest common denominator of the British nationalists who revel in such stories (undoubtedly while fox-hunting and toasting to the queen… )

Just take a look at Telegraph’s website every now and then. It’s filled with the most absurd anti-EU propaganda. A day does not go by when they’re not reporting on how the EU is going under, how the Brits need to pull out, and how the eurocrats are stealing their babies.

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2011/nov/18/1

on the other hand has a different take on this story.

It all seems to have been carefully engineered for purely propaganda purposes by the Telegraph or someone behind them.

Let me reiterate: scarcely anyone on the continent cares what an insignificant propagandist paper in the UK is saying or trying to “prove”. The guys in Brussels don’t give a rats ass, pardon my French, about some bad “PR” for the EU/EFSA that this pathetic stunt seems to have generated among right-winders in the UK.

I can understand you making much of it because you’re heavily biased towards English-language news. But if you take a look at German, French, or any of the central and eastern European Slavic news outlets, you’ll quickly see that this is a non-issue.

Repeated episodes of bad PR can have quite an impact when these “short-lived fluctuations” combine to becomes a long term reality. I have no clue with regards to EFSA, but your explanation of the buffer seems less robust than it would need to be to not worry about PR.

As much as I am sympathetic to regulation that prevents quackery, such methods should be (and appear) rational. When they start appearing as illogical as the quackery itself, it resembles the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” saying. I am not saying that this is the case, but appearance is reality with PR.

Boy, you’re blowing this hugely out of proportion, Steve.

I have to tell you that EFSA doesn’t much worry about “bad PR”. There is a nice buffer (mostly comprised of simple inertia against change) that prevents short-lived fluctuations in public opinion to have long reaching consequences as to how such a behemoth as the eurocracy functions.

This is a good thing in my opinion because experts can focus on their work without worrying what some small segment of the population is a-tweet about today…

Apart from that, the 3 years it took them to address the issue was not spent simply looking at this one case. They are swamped with crackpots wanting to market their loony claims to the public. It simply takes time to wade through them all.

This case will have absolutely zero influence on how EFSA functions. It’s just one more “quirky” ruling that will be laughed at for a while and then forgotten about.

Nobody is batty enough to try and sacrifice an excellent system of anti-quack regulation (currently the best in the world imho) on the cross of one obscure (politically motivated) company making some noise selling magic water. If their intent was to “break the system” and this is what they managed to dream up… they’re even more pathetic than I thought.

The system was set up to regulate specific health claims. For someone to try and abuse it in this manner is simply laughable – namely trying to push through a claim that would obviously be used to promote their special “magic” water. They got a smack-down and quite appropriately so.

And besides:
If they REALLY wanted to say that water prevents dehydration they COULD HAVE stated that with absolutely no need for review. It’s that simple.

As a marketing regulation it does not seem very effective either. It seems heavy handed to prevent companies from saying “drink our special water and it will magically treat dehydration better than other fluids” by not allowing them to say that water is good for dehydration.

Actually it’s the other way around. As far as marketing regulation it’s EXTREMELY effective. The number of food-related crack-potteries has gone done significantly in the past few years since EFSA is swinging hard at them.

And as Carl said: they did prevent them from saying water is good for general “dehydration”.

They prevented them from saying:
Water REDUCES the risk of dehydration as pertaining to a specific disease state. This actually is not the case apriori as has been stated before.

A bit of political background to the story:
http://thedailywh.at/2011/11/20/debunked-hysteria-of-the-day/

Approving the statement seems simple, until you consider it too much. But if you don’t consider it too much, someone is going to use it as a marketing strategy to sell something that is available for free to most of the population they are selling to.

If you sat on that board and had seen Alt Med twist your statement approval into an endorsement of their particular product, you might want to run in a hole and hide every time some patently obvious statement comes up for review.

And you might choose to hide behind a technicality and weather a brief storm of ridicule rather than live for years watching your innocent endorsement be abused outside its intended purpose.

That it would take 3 years and that the people who draft those decisions can’t make simple straightforward explanations for their decisions, is a sin, though.

This statement is surely in error. It should read:

“regular consumption of sufficient amounts of water to maintain hydration can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and of concomitant decrease of performance.”

The last Australian to die on the Kokoda Trail died of water overload, not dehydration. He was so concerned not to get dehydrated that he drank himself to death.

This query to them has “evil marketing opportunity” written all over it.

It turns out that dehydration is a condition of body water depletion. Therefore ‘body water depletion’ isn’t a risk factor for dehydration– rather it is dehydration.

http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/supporting/doc/172e.pdf
“For reduction of disease risk claims, the beneficial physiological effect (which the Regulation requires to be shown for the claim to be permitted) is the reduction (or beneficial alteration) of a risk factor for the development of a human disease (not reduction of the risk of disease). However, undersupply with water would not be considered as a risk factor for dehydration (the disease) in this context as the beneficial alteration of the factor (increased consumption of water) is not a beneficial physiological effect as required by the Regulation.”

This decision was reached by a committee of 21 people. It took about three years to make.
As I understand it the question was asked by a couple professors in Germany as a means of demonstrating the malfunctioning regulatory system current in force.
If that is true, then I would suggest the decision would be more complete with a QED attached to the end.

Dehydration has multiple risk factors. The requested label did not address these other risk factors.

They seem to be taking issue with the identification of the level of water in body tissues as a risk factor for dehydration, saying that the level of water in the tissues is actually a measure of how dehydrated you are, not how high your risk of dehydration is.

Therefore, the water doesn’t lower the risk of becoming dehydrated, it lowers the level of dehydration you already have?

I think you would have to read the entirety of the regulation cited in order to pinpoint the exact language they are referring to in making their decision since they don’t reiterate the requirements of the regulation themselves.

I’m not surprised this is so confusing. I took a European Union law class in law school and I really struggled with understanding their decisions as compared to U.S. legal decisions.

“Loss of body water of about 1 % is normally compensated within 24 hours. Without compensation and with further increase of body water loss, physical and cognitive functions are impaired. The Panel concludes that a cause and effect relationship has been established between the dietary intake of water and maintenance of normal physical and cognitive functions. The Panel considers that, in order to obtain the claimed effect, at least 2.0 L of water should be consumed per day. Such amounts can be easily consumed as part of a balanced diet. The target population is the general population.”
Found here:
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/de/efsajournal/doc/2075.pdf