Chia Pet Is No Longer the World's Dumbest Product

Have I got a deal for you! For 2 bucks you can get a bottle that is filled with:

• Water
• Air
• Voodoo, aka "stabilized O₄ molecules"

This one is so useless that it makes a Chia Pet seem like a defibrillator on a crash cart. Here it is:

Still, there will be people who buy this worthless stuff expecting some kind of health benefit. The company even claims health benefits, and "backs this up" with clinical trials.

Except, they don't do anything of the sort. All in all, this may be the worst science I've ever seen.

First, the chemistry. The seminal paper on O4 comes from the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Light reading by any measure, as evidenced by the title:

"Bond Breaking and Bond Making in Tetraoxygen: Analysis of the O2(X3 Σg -) + O2(X3 Σg -) / O4 Reaction Using the Electron Pair Localization Function"

The content is likewise simple to comprehend, and intuitively obvious:

And, on the off chance that some of this is not clear, the conclusion ties everything together nicely:

"Such a possibility is particularly interesting to get new insights into the nature of the pairing and localization of electrons at these various levels of description

and, particularly, to understand more deeply the role of the dynamical (Coulomb hole) and the nondynamical (neardegeneracy) correlation effects."

(Disclaimer: I do not understand one single sentence in the entire paper. No human could. Physical chemists are not human.)

Oxygen and oxygenated water are two of the more egregious examples of pseudoscience crap products—all of which are based on a bunch of lies and myths. In fact, an entire website called Oxygenated Water Nonsense is dedicated to debunking an astoundingly large number of quack claims, some of which are so bad that have earned the right to take their place among the giant pythons of the snake oil world.

The real fun here is examining the company's health claims that were supposedly demonstrated by a double blinded clinical trial that was conducted at Indiana State University. Well, part of this is true. There was a trial.

Neil Fleming, Ph.D. of the Department of Kinesiology, Recreation and Sport published this beauty: "An investigation of the ergogenic and physiological effects of ingesting a high concentration oxygen supplement on subsequent exercise performance in running."

I'm willing to bet that the company was on its knees praying that no scientist would both track down, and evaluate the paper. Sorry guys. I did. And I can say without any hesitation that when it comes to demonstrating the utility of anything, you can not possibly do worse, which will soon become evident shortly.

Let's start with the "best." How much better do runners perform when they drink Oxigen? Prepare yourself:

To the untrained eye, it may look like the performance of these two groups was identical. But, to fully appreciate the "magnitude" of a 0.5% difference, you need to blow up the graphic. A neon atom is added for perspective:

If you're expecting this to get any better, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Here are some more "improvements" caused by oxygen supplementation (OS). Once again, both groups perform identically.

And why might that be? BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! The "O₄-enhanced" water, which doesn't even exist, isn't doing anything. There are several other examples of hyper-nothingness which look just like this. But the study actually trumpeted that one measurment actually showing a real difference in the two groups—clearance of lactic acid from the blood following exercise.

If you are desperately hoping for any kind of positive result (and maybe have dropped acid first), perhaps you could conclude that there really was a difference between the two groups. But, look at the raw numbers:

It takes 1127 ± 272 seconds for the OS group to eliminate half of the post-exercise lactic acid from the blood, as compared to 1223 ± 334 seconds for the placebo group. The difference in this time period (96 seconds) is minuscule. But, even this isn't real. The size of the error bars (272 seconds) is triple that of the difference (between the two groups) that is being measured. Which means that if they ran the experiment again, they could just as easily see the following because of "data wobbling."

Nice use of technology, guys. If you want to really do something innovative with bottled water, the following seems to be quite promising:

O₄, my oxygenated ass.