Talk:Penta Water/Archive 1

Help!
Someone (who doesn't sign his/her name) is making lots of edits to the page that appear to be very pro Penta and without even including an edit summary. There's NOTHING wrong with adding counter-arguments to support some of Penta's claims- but let's hope that it's done responsibly with good sources- or else this could be dangerously close to vandalism. Let me know what you think. Christianjb 23:41, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
 * A DNS lookup on the anonymous editor, 64.165.22.130, comes out as BioHydration of 268 Bush St, San Francisco, CA 94104. As you say, they're free to edit an entry, but if it fails the usual Wikipedia criteria such as verifiable source and NPOV, others are equally free to bin it. "One 'endorsement' that is difficult to argue against is that every day thousands of people spend an average of $35 for a case of 24 - 1/2 liter bottles of Penta water" is just the standard fallacy of Appeal to Popularity, aka bandwagon fallacy. RayGirvan 01:55, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the great research Ray! Fantastic!  I (and others) reverted most of the more opinionated edits by the poster.  However, I did try to incorporate the poster's main points in a fair way in subsequent edits.  To be fair, I don't think the edits today were vandalism- but the poster didn't sufficiently back-up and source his/her data making most of his/her edits look a bit amateurish.  At least the poster didn't try and remove anything from the page.  I think we all still welcome well thought out statements in support of Penta.  Also, I still invite Penta to comment on the Penta Wikipedia page on this talk page.Christianjb 03:46, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Actually contrary to my statements above- I have found odd sentences which were deleted from the page by the BHRL employee. Not only did the poster do this anonymously- but no explanation was given for the removal of text.  This drives me crazy and I do regard it as vandalism.  It's also creating extra work for the rest of the posters who are behaving responsibly.  I'm not sure how much more of this I want to stand for.  Christianjb 23:22, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
 * More pro Penta edits made by an anonymous user (80.3.32.9) today. These were speedily removed (thanks Geni!) presumably because they fail in almost every way to meet the minimum requirements of Wikipedia.  They were unsourced, biased in the extreme, opinionated and very probably slanderous (towards James Randi).   Christianjb 30 June 2005 18:01 (UTC)

James Randi Replies to remarks made by Penta supporters
From an email correspondence with Christianjb

Our involvement with Penta is very clear. They agreed to be tested, then they backed out. Any Wikipedia entry that suggests we have been unwilling to test Penta, is a direct lie. I refer you to www.randi.org/jr/08-24-01.html and www.randi.org/jr/08-31-01.html for the story. The Wikipedia entry says: “Bio-hydration Research Lab has offered to send samples to [JREF] for testing, but they have refused to spend the time, effort, or energy to scientifically prove or disprove the research conducted by Bio-hydration or Aquaphotonics.” As we have patiently explained to Holloway, any tests that JREF would do, would be rightly ignored as possibly biased. It is not our function to decide for ourselves whether any of these claims are true; it is the obligation of those making the claims, to submit to proper independent tests – agreed to formally by both parties, as clearly described in our challenge – and the JREF is and always has been, ready to do this. Holloway at first agreed to this process almost four years ago, then he backed out. We still stand willing to enter into tests – he has refused. James Randi.

Posted by Christianjb 18:35, 25 May 2005 (UTC)


 * BTW, James wrote to me today to clear up that he's NOT blaming Wikipedia or the responsible posters- his comments are specifically regarding the employee of BHRL's remarks. It is absolutely a matter of public record that Penta has not submitted to independent testing arranged by the James Randi Educational Foundation.  It's irritating that the BHRL employee who's posting to this page is trying to muddy the water on this issue. Christianjb 23:26, 25 May 2005 (UTC)


 * "trying to muddy the water on this issue" heh,heh... Lisiate 22:52, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Claims made by Penta: not verified
All of the items with asterisks still ahve to be verified somehow, or we shouldn't be reporting them. archive.org might be of assistance if someone knows the original pages. Melchoir 06:57, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I believe this company is dead
As a former employee, around a month ago I was laid off along with the majority of the company due to financial problems. I drove by the other day and saw a "For Sale" sign on their building. Anyone hear of anything on this?


 * I've heard nothing of it, but I say good riddance. On the other hand, sorry you've lost your job and good luck finding work elsewhere. Maybe for a more scrupulous company. 24.40.172.245 04:20, 20 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Is it possible that they have more than one building? It looks like they moved multiple times according to the Penta-Water website, but this says nothing else. If it really did close down, does anyone know if they are still selling the bottled Penta-Water? Jon Fawkes 06:06, 24 January 2007 (UTC)


 * As of July 31, 2007, Penta Water is still available at my local Southern California "Clark’s Nutrition and Natural Foods Market" store. Someone is still bottling it for $35/case. Probably from Carlsbad bay.

Penta Water China
Does anyone notice the link out to the Penta Water China page? It looks like it might hold some information, but it also looks like it isn't visited very often either (the only poll they've got on that page has 2 votes total, one of them being mine). I've looked around that page, it looks almost exactly like the official page, but I skimmed it very quickly. If someone else would like to take a look at it, please do. It is likely that I missed a lot of information. Jon Fawkes 08:56, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Removed a line
I removed a line which stated that Penta water, like all types of water, has 0 calories.

It is impossible to have a non-distilled sample of water to have 0 calories.--18jahremädchen 01:05, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Food and drink Tagging
This article talk page was automatically added with WikiProject Food and drink banner as it falls under Category:Food or one of its subcategories. If you find this addition an error, Kindly undo the changes and update the inappropriate categories if needed. The bot was instructed to tagg these articles upon consenus from WikiProject Food and drink. You can find the related request for tagging here. Maximum and careful attention was done to avoid any wrongly tagging any categories, but mistakes may happen... If you have concerns, please inform on the project talk page -- TinucherianBot (talk) 22:56, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !
In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :) DumZiBoT (talk) 12:37, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * "archive" :
 * the ultimate in hydration for your body
 * British Triathlon Association Introduction to Penta Feature

Style
The last two paragraphs of the lead read:
 * As written in other wikipedia sections, such as water memory: Research published in 2005 on hydrogen bond network dynamics in water showed that "liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure" within fifty femtoseconds.[6] Quite simply, within the second they stop the 11 hours of spinning of their water in their purification process, penta water is simply filtered water, no different. (this is akin to the claim that sea salt is better than table salt)
 * In physical chemistry, the commonly used (non-trademarked) term for a cluster of five water molecules is the water pentamer.

There are a number of problems with these paragraphs; someone please remove or improve them! The sea salt statement should probably be removed - as our article on sea salt says, "its mineral content gives it a different taste from table salt".--Noe (talk) 16:55, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Too Sciency?
As an aside- I'm trying to write this page in clear non-technical English. If anyone thinks I'm getting too sciency or technical then please let me know. Christianjb 04:21, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * When it comes to debunking something idiotic like this, I'm not sure it's possible to be "sciency" enough. 193.63.174.10 (talk) 11:15, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Penta's and WP's arguments about hydration
This substance is of course nonsense. However, I suspect that the last bit in the Hydration subsection is unfounded speculation on the article's part: "It is unclear as to why water more easily penetrating cell membranes is necessarily a good thing. Cells maintain themselves in a careful homeostasis. Water that behaved in the way claimed of penta-water would probably be poisonous, rather than beneficial -- increased cellular uptake of water via an increase in cellular permeability would undoubtedly radically disturb normal cellular function." It seems to me that an increase in water's ability to pass through membranes would have little effect since it is already quite efficient and the increase would affect both directions of transport. (One could in theory have a water pump enzyme and a magic kind of water on which it acted more efficiently, but that seems far-fetched.) Moreover, in the absence of dehydration and rehydration I don't think cells take up any significant amounts of water (where would it go?) and cellular respiration even routinely creates water inside the cell!

Would it be useful to make this last point (so that the criticism would become "cells don't need water anyway, silly"), or would it be better to just strike the article's scientific criticism entirely and let the absurd, contradictory statements Penta itself makes stand on their own? --Tardis (talk) 16:14, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Complete mess of an article.
There are text message, irrelevant ALL CAPS text, a bunch of links to a defunct website and the whole thing reads like a PR article that's been thoroughly debunked. It is schizophrenic in scope, switching wildy from psuedo-scientific claims poorly referenced or structured, followed by yet another way of saying "yo, this shit is obviously bullshit." Maybe this article needs to be subjected to high-energy sound waves to purify it. --71.123.174.160 (talk) 08:01, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Penta employee? 68.193.122.145 (talk) 06:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree that there's a lot of dead links and poor content layout. A restructure of the article may be needed. - Team4Technologies (talk) 17:19, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Sites critical of Penta Water - 404 or unreliable sources
These are broken links to sources - need to clean this up.

http://www.randi.org/jr/032803.html - 404 http://www.randi.org/jr/08-24-01.html - 404 http://www.randi.org/jr/08-31-01.html - 404 http://www.randi.org/jr/040105capitalizing.html - 404

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/27/badscience.science - unreliable source http://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/feb/10/research.badscience - unreliable source http://www.theguardian.com/travel/Guardian/science/2005/mar/10/badscience - 404 http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/mar/24/badscience.science - unreliable source

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/ - links to homepage of The Times, unreliable source

http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-Action/Adjudications/Adjudication-Not-Found.aspx?Adjudication_id=39409 - 404 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.130.63.58 (talk) 14:39, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Penta Water. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20110524124439/http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications/2005/3/Penta-UK/CS_39409.aspx to http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications/2005/3/Penta-UK/CS_39409.aspx

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 07:43, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Updating
Hello all,

I believe there are enough legitimate sources to give this page a little revamp, I'm going to use all current active and reputable sources to try and clean this page up a little bit in the next few days (get rid of dead links, expand references section). Literalkoala (talk) 21:32, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
 * There's nothing wrong with a WP:DEADLINK if you can find an archive of it. -Nat Gertler (talk) 01:20, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

I think I was able to find all the dead links and archive them. Literalkoala (talk) 07:53, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Penta's POV
A representative from Penta UK contacted me today expressing their point of view regarding the Penta Water Wikipedia web-page. I told him that he is welcome to edit the Penta page, though his edits may well themselves be edited (especially if they are not sourced). I also mentioned that Penta should feel free to put their point of view on this talk page and that Wikipedians would treat them civilly and respect their right to state their case. I think we can all agree on this. Christianjb 06:58, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't agree with this. Their "point of view" contradicts reality and science and amounts to a very conflicting article. If there are sourced, respectable, scientific resources that assert the opposite of Penta's quintessential marketing bullshit, it really has no place here. There could be a small section that at least explains their false claims, but it should not dominate or pervade the article as it does now. A simple link to their website should be all the marketing needed here and more.

Khanstant (talk) 19:17, 2 April 2011 (UTC)


 * No, I don't agree with this. Scammers should not be treated as if they're acting on good faith.  They should be scorned, ridiculed, and shamed at every turn. 2601:647:4F00:7D:E86B:25BE:FC93:1341 (talk) 06:00, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

from Vfd
On 16 March 2005, this article was nominated for deletion. The result was keep. See Votes for deletion/Penta Water for a record of the discussion. – ABCD 02:28, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Compukiss link
Deleted. Googling a key phrase - "upstart water from San Diego leapfrog the players" - reveals it's not an independent review, just a widely syndicated 2003 Penta press release (see http://ww1.prweb.com/releases/2003/2/prweb57946.php). RG Apr 07 2005


 * Thanks, and nice research! I would however like to include a few links showing +ve reviews of Penta- even if it's only to show that a lot of health food stores promote this stuff.  Also, it makes the page look a little more balanced- someone out there is buying this. Christianjb 21:48, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * I think the Earthly Goods one is also iffy as a testimonial. Google again shows a few duplicates, suggesting its source is promotional copy from Penta. RG Apr 10 2005
 * Haha, this is getting embarrassing! As I said- I do want to provide at least a couple of links showing that some people like Penta- after all they're doing very good business.  (BTW- if people want to spend a lot of money on bottled water because it makes them feel cool- well that's their decision!)  Well, here's what I suggest.  If you can show that the words on that page are partially taken from Penta press releases then just put a note next to the link saying that and including your source.  After all, it is useful information to know that many of the +ve reviews are just reheated Penta press releases.Christianjb 04:21, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)