Haydn Shaughnessy looks at new enriched water products that are now hitting the shelves
Like five-a-day of fruit and vegetables, water is an area we are constantly reminded not to neglect. But water is the kind of drink that brings little in the way of pleasure and, in hedonistic times, we're destined to be ambivalent about necessary rituals that don't obviously please.
In Ireland, we currently drink round 130 million litres of bottled water a year. Selling water to the Irish is no mean achievement and credit should go to the French for shipping it from the Alps and the Auvergne, although the brand leader is the home-grown Ballygowan.
According to Willie Wixted, product developer at Shannon Minerals, a producer of bespoke and "engineered" waters, the most obvious benefit of drinking more water is that it replaces sugar-laden soda drinks in our diet.
But not quite.
Over the past five years the ordinary bottled water market has reached what marketing experts call its "carrying capacity", ie saturation point (a pun they wisely avoid).
However, we still drink around the same amount of Coca Cola (133 million litres were sold in 2002) as we do bottled water and the soft drinks market amounts to some 670 million litres a year in total.
The biggest growth category is the "emerging soft drinks" - isotonic drinks like Lucozade Sport, BMP, flavoured waters and a new generation of enhanced waters yet to see the light of day.
Inspired in part by the need to find new markets, water companies have been searching out new roles for the wet stuff (see panel).
Shannon Minerals has already launched a range of appetite-suppressing waters in Britain, starting with Cranberry Trim, and is due to launch them in Ireland shortly. Containing hydroxy citric acid, which inhibits the conversion of carbohydrate into fat and persuades the liver to send out a "satisfied" signal earlier, the drinks are thought to reduce food consumption by around 15 per cent.
It is one of only a few innovations to reach the market recently but there are many in the pipeline.
"There's a broader move toward functional foods," says Wixted, "that water is a part of and is drawn along by. You won't find a yoghurt now that is not a functional product."
And water seems to be going the same way.
Shannon Minerals is developing a water with a calcium-additive that supplies 17 per cent of the recommended daily allowance of calcium, although Wixted accepts that milk might be by far the better delivery mechanism.
Food ingredient scientists at the German chemical company BASF have devised new production methods that reduce the particle size of important vitamins so they can be added while allowing the water to retain the appearance of its original purity.
Vitamin E enriched water should reach the shelves next year.
The question yet to be asked is whether we understand enough about the role of water in the body to indulge in what looks like a sidetrack, just as we've increased water intake to moderately useful levels compared with other fluids.
Although we are more water than we are skin, organs or chemicals, there is as yet no water medicine. There are gastroentirologists but no human hydrologists, haematologists but no science of water in the body. For the 70 per cent of us that is water, there is no paternal consultant in a white coat.
Our awareness of the importance of hydration, however, owes much to one medical scientist, Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, who died a year ago.
Although he appears on the Quackwatch list, an independent but controversial website that "outs" doctors who, the website claims, preach junk medicine, Batmanghelidj's death was marked by an obituary in the Washington Post which paid tribute to his impact on the general public's perception of water and its importance to health.
His 1992 book The Bodies Many Cries for Water contained a number of irresistible claims. Water can cure asthma, allergies, arthritis, angina, migraine headaches, hypertension, raised cholesterol, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, depression, and diabetes in the elderly, said Batmanghelidj.
He also argued that water had pain-relieving properties.
Bizarre, perhaps but logical. If your body is dehydrated then you will feel pain. Batmanghelidj was simply saying a malfunctioning body will send pain signals to the brain.
But he went one step further and argued, for example, the use of anti-histamines in pain relief and in allergy relief was fundamentally misguided. The neurotransmitter "histamine" controls water regulation and the "drought management programs of the body", said Batmangheldj.
If you treat pain and allergies with anti-histamine, you prevent the body from interpreting the signal to drink more, he said.
Batmangheldj argued also that drinks other than water interfered with this basic management system and that ultimately the only hydration that really mattered was plain and simple, beginning with H and ending in O.
In one of his final interviews he put down his marker: "Nothing substitutes for water - not a thing. No drink - no coffee, no tea, no alcoholic beverages. Not even fruit juices. Each one of them has its own agenda. Your body is used to a fluid that has no agenda."
A purist's approach no doubt but arguably a safe one.