If being an early adopter of fitness trends is your bag, you may want to hop on the maple water train before it leaves the station. The exciting claims for this product include hydration and supplying you with vitamins and minerals. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with plain old water and eating a healthy diet.

You’ll likely hear no shortage of carefully selected language to sell you the next super drink. From nutritionist and DRINKmaple cofounder, Kate Weiler:

We’re not creating a hot new ingredient in a lab. We’re taking something from nature that has been used for years.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Marketing 101. If an ingredient has been around for a long time, advertisers are banking on you feeling more confident in ingesting it. That’s not unreasonable, necessarily, but at its heart isn’t science. Various brands make claims about maple water being traditionally consumed by different tribes of people. Supposedly, it cures all sorts of conditions, from nausea to high blood pressure.

We’d be best served to remember how many products in recent memory spout similar narratives. From Vitamin Water to coconut water to acai juice, the list is endless. The labels for these products all pump our brains full of catch phrases like “super foods,” “maximum hydration” or “energy enhancer.” Some rational thought and we’ll know better; labels are intentionally misleading. From relizen.com:

“When it comes to nutritious eating, fresh fruits and vegetables are the gold standard, but sticking to a healthy diet is trickier when you add packaged foods. There are all kinds of misleading food labels and healthy sounding catch phrases out there that create an aura of wholesomeness around not so good choices.”

Remember that very few of those label claims mean anything. In most cases, they’re entirely unregulated and left to you as the consumer to sort through. Be wary; bold claims should require bold evidence, not a bright package.

That’s not to say that some of the fad products we’ve heard about don’t ever contain healthy ingredients. For example, maple water is said to have “more antioxidants than tomatoes.” Awesome. Skip the vegetables, drink this bottled product? Hmmm.

The point is that health doesn’t come in blingy package. Most of these products are essentially supplements, and you know my take on them. They are food or something similar, removed from their original form. I’ll drink the coconut water, but pass me the whole damn coconut.

Kap