Dr Mercola, you're at it again.

As I expected, Dr Joe Mercola has finally revealed his strategy behind 'bagging' water ionizers. After his last diatribe about water ionizers, totally baseless and error-riddled that it was, he received thousands of protests from angry water ionizer users and gave no reply. Among his bloopers was one statement that water ionizers don't filter the water that passes through them.

Hey Joe? Have you ever actually looked at one?

He then resorted to the old 'I and most experts' attack, which allows someone to make unfounded statements under the 'experts' cover - with immunity from all but those who see it for what it is; a marketing trick with nothing behind it.

He has gone further, in both cases with not a skerrick of evidence in the form that he has been trained to take not of; actual studies. With no references to any studies he has claimed on one occasion that alkaline water interferes with the mitochondria, and this latest rave contains the again unfounded claim that alkaline water may only be good for short term detox.

Just imagine if young Joe had presented a paper on the subject for his final college exam. A complete rave with absolutely no technical referencing that related to his major points. His professors would have exploded and he'd probably be selling timeshares right now.

So why is this so important? 

Well, since his first baseless rave, water alkalizer sales in the US have fallen over 50%. This means the small operator who survives through exceptional customer support will fail and disappear, leaving thousands of people marooned with their water ionizer and no-one to come to for support or service.  Mercola is the largest alternative health email in the world, sending emails out to six million people every few days.

So let's now examine his reason for this attack, and the latest attack that includes distilled water and even his old personal favourite, reverse osmosis. There must be a reason someone like Doc Joe even gives up his own preferred water filter.
So let's see if we can see the elephant in the room.

The 'expert' he discussed water ionizers with in his first rant was a salesman from Aquasana. 

Aquasana is a respected large manufacturer of basic water filters. Even though the salesman must have known that some of Joe's ideas were just plain wrong, he did nothing to correct him in the interview.. and I wondered why. Well, now it's obvious.
Joe has done a  deal to rebrand Aquasana filters under his own brand and now sells them to his SIX MILLION subscribers.

Let's do a few quick figures to see if we can find the Elephant.

Let's say Joe gets just one person in a hundred subscribers ordering his recommended whole house Aquasana/Mercola water filter system at $1092.

That's six million divided by 100 which equals 60,000 at $1092 each.

That's $65,520,000.00!

Now I think I understand the reasons Joe didn't bother finding any real facts about alkaline water.

Sixty Five million reasons.

The sad thing is that Joe does a lot of good work uncovering the bad aspects of Big Pharma. He also puts himself 'out there' on some quite controversial subjects, so it would be wrong to condemn Joe per se. No, he's just got it seriously wrong on this one and needs to show us that my suspicions are totally false, that he has in fact the studies he should have quoted about alkaline water, and that his basic facts and understanding of alkaline water is.. well, wrong.