Since there no scientific work has been done, either on this product, or the mechanism in which it supposedly works, here are some more non-scientific links;
http://ask.metafilter.com/192112/This-h ... n-a-bottle
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comm ... _reactive/
Take it from a chemist: That's just a load of nonsense. "Reactive molecule" isn't an established term with some specific scientific meaning other than it's literal meaning. And the literal meaning is so generic that it's useless. (And if anything, a 'reactive molecule' is something that's bad for you. Chemically reactive substances = toxic substances. And 'reactive' and 'stabilization' isn't something you'd normally see in the same sentence. A reactive compound is by definition not very stable.)
"Redox signaling molecules" sounds like a scientific term as well, but isn't. "Redox" means reduction/oxidation reactions, and signaling substances are anything that has a biochemical receptor of some kind that changes something else due to that molecule's presence or absence. Again, it's a couple of vague scientific-sounding terms strung together to sound like they're talking about some established scientific concept, when they're not. It's not an established term and the literal meaning is too vague to say anything at all. Just because something sounds 'sciency' doesn't make it science, or vice-versa: "sonic hedgehog" is a more established chemistry term than "redox signalling molecule".
If the ingredients are water and sodium chloride, it's pure salt water. Salt water doesn't have any miraculous health benefits, and if it did, we'd probably have found out about it a few thousand years ago. So were are those 'reactive molecules'? It's not water or sodium chloride. Those are very inert molecules, if anything.
MLM schemes are scams in general. This one in particular seems a total scam. Yes, they are selling salt water for $1 an ounce, by dazzling you with faux-scientific terminology. If there was "real science" behind this, they'd be using real scientific terminology.
"Redox signalling molecule" gives only 10 hits on google scholar, which is essentially nothing and certainly tells you it's not an established term. Four of those refer to nitric oxide, and four of them to hydrogen peroxide. Both of those are toxic gases (why? - Because they're reactive) and certainly not present in whatever they're trying to sell.
This is bullshit. It's salt water for $1 an ounce. The science-babble is meaningless. "Reactive molecule stabilization technology" is the kind of phrase that's probably best translated as "it may just look like water, but it's magic water that we've trained to do tricks!" "Redox Signaling Molecules" isn't even that meaningful - it's just a string of science words. In chemistry, many chemical reactions are characterised as "redox reactions". Reaction of sodium and chlorine to form sodium chloride would be such a reaction. Signalling molecules in biology are molecules that are secreted in some cells to transmit a message to other cells. Whilst it's true that these words technically can be said to apply to salt water, it doesn't turn it into medicine. There's no difference between this stuff and the water you drink and salt you get in your diet anyway. Salt water is salt water. Dercum's disease sucks, but wasting your money on this won't help.
edit;
Let me also recommend
Bad Science by
Ben Goldacre , who regularly takes on these kinds of scams. Here's part of his book, that may sound a little familiar;
Aqua Detox is a detox footbath, one of many similar products. It has been promoted uncritically in some very embarrassing articles in the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Sunday Times, GQ magazine and various TV shows. Here is a taster from the Mirror.
We sent Alex for a new treatment called Aqua Detox which releases toxins before your eyes. Alex says: ‘I place my feet in a bowl of water, while therapist Mirka pours salt drops in an ionising unit, which will adjust the bio-energetic field of the water and encourage my body to discharge toxins. The water changes colour as the toxins are released. After half an hour, the water’s turned red…she gets our photographer Karen to give it a go. She gets a bowl of brown bubbles. Mirka diagnoses an overloaded liver and lymph—Karen needs to drink less alcohol and more water. Wow, I feel virtuous!’
The hypothesis from these companies is very clear: your body is full of ‘toxins’, whatever those may be; your feet are filled with special ‘pores’ (discovered by ancient Chinese scientists, no less); you put your feet in the bath, the toxins are extracted, and the water goes brown. Is the brown in the water because of the toxins? Or is that merely theatre?
One way to test this is to go along and have an Aqua Detox treatment yourself at a health spa, beauty salon, or any of me thousands of places they are available online, and take your feet out of the bath when the therapist leaves the room. If the water goes brown without your feet in it, then it wasn’t your feet or your toxins that did it. That is a controlled experiment: everything is the same in both conditions, except for the presence or absence of your feet.
There are disadvantages with this experimental method (and there is an important lesson here, that we must often weigh up the benefits and practicalities of different forms of research, which will become important in later chapters). From a practical perspective, the ‘feet out’ experiment involves subterfuge, which may make you uncomfortable. But it is also expensive: one session of Aqua Detox will cost more than the components to build your own detox device, a perfect model of the real one.
You will need:
One car battery charger
Two large nails
Kitchen salt
Warm water
One Barbie doll
A full analytic laboratory (optional)
This experiment involves electricity and water. In a world of hurricane hunters and volcanologists, we must accept that everyone sets their own level of risk tolerance. You might well give yourself a nasty electric shock if you perform this experiment at home, and it could easily blow the wiring in your house. It is not safe, but it is in some sense relevant to your understanding of MMR, homeopathy, post-modernist critiques of science and the evils of big pharma. Do not build it.
When you switch your Barbie Detox machine on, you will see that the water goes brown, due to a very simple process called electrolysis: the iron electrodes rust, essentially, and the brown rust goes into the water. But there is something more happening in there, something you might half-remember from chemistry at school. There is salt in the water. The proper scientific term for household salt is ‘sodium chloride’: in solution, this means that there are chloride ions floating around, which have a negative charge (and sodium ions, which have a positive charge). The red connector on your car battery charger is a ‘positive electrode’, and here, negatively charged electrons are stolen away from the negatively charged chloride ions, resulting in the production of free chlorine gas.
So chlorine gas is given off by the Barbie Detox bath, and indeed by the Aqua Detox footbath; and the people who use this product have elegantly woven that distinctive chlorine aroma into their story: it’s the chemicals, they explain; it’s the chlorine coming out of your body, from all the plastic packaging on your food, and all those years bathing in chemical swimming pools. ‘It has been interesting to see the colour of the water change and smell the chlorine leaving my body,’ says one testimonial for the similar product Emerald Detox. At another sales site: ‘The first time she tried the Q2 [Energy Spa], her business partner said his eyes were burning from all the chlorine, that was coming out of her, leftover from her childhood and early adulthood.’ All that chemically chlorine gas that has accumulated in your body over the years. It’s a frightening thought.
But there is something else we need to check. Are there toxins in the water? Here we encounter a new problem: what do they mean by toxin? I’ve asked the manufacturers of many detox products this question time and again, but they demur. They wave their hands, they talk about stressful modern lifestyles, they talk about pollution, they talk about junk food, but they will not tell me the name of a single chemical which I can measure. ‘What toxins are being extracted from the body with your treatment?’ I ask. ‘Tell me what is in the water, and I will look for it in a laboratory.’ I have never been given an answer.
After much of their hedging and fudging, I chose two chemicals pretty much at random: creatinine and urea. These are common breakdown products from your body’s metabolism, and your kidneys get rid of them in urine. Through a friend, I went for a genuine Aqua Detox treatment, took a sample of brown water, and used the disproportionately state-of-the-art analytic facilities of St Mary’s Hospital in London to hunt for these two chemical ‘toxins’. There were no toxins in the water. Just lots of brown, rusty iron.
Now, with findings like these, scientists might take a step back, and revise their ideas about what is going on with the footbaths. We don’t really expect the manufacturers to do that, but what they say in response to these findings is very interesting, at least to me, because it sets up a pattern that we will see repeated throughout the world of pseudoscience: instead of addressing the criticisms, or embracing the new findings in a new model, they seem to shift the goalposts and retreat, crucially, into untestable positions.
Some of them now deny that toxins come out in the footbath (which would stop me measuring them): your body is somehow informed that it is time to release toxins in the normal way—whatever that is, and whatever the toxins are—only more so. Some of them now admit that the water goes a bit brown without your feet in it, but ‘not as much’. Many of them tell lengthy stories about the ‘bioenergetic field’, which they say cannot be measured, except by how well you are feeling. All of them talk about how stressful modern life is.
That may well be true. But it has nothing to do with their foot bath, which is all about theatre: and theatre is the common theme for all detox products, as we will see. On with the brown goo.
Ben's article on "Aqua Detox" was published in The Guardian in 2004 (which this chapter of his book is based on). That's roughly 6 years before Asea came out. There are plenty of other electrolysed salt water scams out there too. But we are supposed to believe that despite all the previous scams regarding electrolysed salt water, this new one actually works...
