People paid £28 for hot dog water that promised to help them lose weight
The water was created as a stunt to encourage people to think critically about health marketing
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Your support makes all the difference.Questionable fad diets promising fast-and-easy weight loss come and go - but “hot dog water” may be the weirdest one yet.
The unfiltered hot dog water was sold at a Car-Free Day festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, for $38 (£28) - with an appealing sales pitch to go along with it.
Promising to help you lose weight, increase brain function, make you look younger, and improve your vitality, all while being Keto-compatible, the water's benefits sound too good to be true - which they were.
In reality, the water was a stunt created by Hot Dog Water CEO Douglas Bevans, a performance artist, to make a statement about misleading health marketing.
Bevans told Global News: “The protein of the Hot Dog Water helps your body uptake the water content, and the sodium and all the things you’d need post-workout.
“We’ve created a recipe, having a lot of people put a lot of effort into research and a lot of people with backgrounds in science creating the best version of Hot Dog Water that we could.”
Replenishing electrolytes after a workout is important if you've sweat a lot - but hot dogs aren't the way to do it.
The water also had testimonials from “professionals,” including one from Dr Cynthia Dringus, a Nobel Prize-winning nutritionist, who said: “Hot Dog Water is the NEW coconut water!”
But below all of the false claims, the fine print read: “Hot Dog Water in its absurdity hopes to encourage critical thinking related to product marketing and the significant role it can play in our purchasing choices.”
The bizarre pitch and lack of scientific evidence to back up any of the claims didn’t stop people from reportedly shelling out $38 (£28) a bottle to buy the hot dog water - which proved Bevans' point.
Although there were some people that realised it was a joke immediately, according to Bevans, many others were simply baffled - or interested.
“They’ve been drinking it for hours,” he said. “We have gone through about 60 litres of real hot dog water.”
Bevans’ marketing had a lot to do with the water’s success, however. To pull off the stunt, he told Global News he spent around $1,200 (£904) on bottles, labels, and branding - in the hopes that “people will actually go away and reconsider some of these other $80 bottles of water that will come out that are ‘raw’ or smart waters,’ or anything that doesn’t have any substantial scientific backing but just a lot of pretty impressive marketing.”
The stall also sold Hot Dog Water lip balm, breath spray, and body fragrance.
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