You've probably heard the buzz about "raw water," the hottest new drink in Silicon Valley. It promises benefits like "natural probiotics" and "beauty minerals" like silica—and as we just discovered, it's a total rip-off.

A New York Times trend piece and several follow-ups profiled "Fountain of Truth" raw water. Made by a company called Live Water, it’s advertised as "unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water.” A 2.5 gallon jug of “Fountain of Truth” recently retailed for $60.99 (about $24 per gallon) in a boutique grocery store in San Francisco, prompting shock from consumers and horror from scientists.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

As it turns out, the “Fountain of Truth” is perfectly safe to drink. That’s because it’s the exact same water that flows out of the taps in Oregon. At $64 for a minimum of four jugs, that’s an awful lot of money to pay for essentially the same water you can get out of your bathroom sink.

Live Water makes it look like its product has been skimmed off the surface of a magical mountain spring. Founder Mukhande Singh lives in Hawaii, and you can find him on Instagram filling glass orbs from natural water sources trickling down over jungle vegetation, or from PVC pipes protruding from springs just below the ground. Singh—whose birth name is Christopher Sanborn—says he’s personally drunk from “hundreds” of natural springs and has never gotten sick. His company’s site even includes a link to findaspring.com, a website for water gatherers to find naturally occurring water sources.

When raw water first started going viral, a number of other outlets reported on the dangers of collecting your drinking water directly from a spring. Given the potential health risks, we wanted to find out exactly where “Fountain of Truth” comes from.

On its website, Live Water says it's sourced from Opal Springs, Oregon, a natural spring at the bottom of a canyon near the small city of Madras. So we called Jonathan Modie, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Public Health, to ask what kind of water "collecting" goes on at Opal Springs.

Modie said that Opal Springs was fed by an aquifer that was able to meet all the standards for public consumption without treatment, and that the water was distributed by the Deschutes Valley Water District, a nonprofit utility company that's been in business since 1919. When we called the Deschutes Valley Water District to ask how bottling companies like Live Water get water from the spring. They made it clear that no, Singh isn’t down at the bottom of the Opal Springs Canyon dunking his $33 1 gallon globes in by hand like he does on his Instagram.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"They all like to sorta imply that they're filling bottles right outta Opal Springs," Edson Pugh, the general manager, told me. "They are not down at our spring bottling directly from the source. It's the same water that we're serving our customers."

In other words, Live Water’s pricey “Fountain of Truth” is just the tap water from Jefferson County, which residents get piped into their homes for about one-third of a cent per gallon.

When we asked Live Water to confirm this, Singh was open about it.

"The town of Madras, Oregon, has been drinking raw unsterilized Opal Springs water from their taps for over half a century and no one has ever gotten sick," Singh said in an email. "Our water is indeed the same water that comes out of their taps." Shortly before publication, Live Water updated its site to acknowledge this fact.

When asked why a minimum Live Water delivery costs $64, Singh replied: “Our water delivery service is so expensive as a result of our refrigerated trucks, refrigerated storage, and the cost for custom made glass jugs. We are acquiring some outside investment soon, and will be building up our infrastructure. We hope to make prices more affordable at that time.”

It’s true that “Fountain of Truth” does not go through the filtering, UV-purifying, and ozonation processes that other bottled water brands do. But the only proven difference this makes is that it shortens the shelf life of the water itself. (Live Water embraces this, noting that its "raw" water has a shelf life of "one full lunar cycle" after delivery.)

The problem is that despite Singh’s claims that Live Water provides “natural probiotics” and “beauty minerals,” skipping out on those treatment processes doesn’t have any proven health benefits. Live Water alleges that “water sterilization disrupts healthy bacterias.” Tricia Van Laar, a microbiologist at California State University, Fresno, told us she’d never heard of any of the bacteria listed on Live Water’s site as being used as probiotics.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Although Singh’s claims that Live Water is good for you appear to be bullshit, It’s not illegal, per se, for the company to make these false claims. The company includes all the relevant FDA disclaimers about its mystical claims, which essentially act as a buffer against accusations of false advertising. Singh’s Instagram is full of raw water gathering, but he never explicitly says he’s showing the Live Water bottling process for its actual product.

To be fair, as far as tap water goes, Live Water is pretty great. The Deschutes Valley Water District won "Best Tasting Water" awards in a blind taste test with judges from across the state in 1996, 2001, 2003, and 2013, and Pugh said local residents tell him they often take tap water with them in bottles on vacation. But does that make it worth anywhere from $16-$60 per jug in San Francisco?

For Silicon Valley's new-money technocrats, spending $90 dollars a month on drinking water may not be a big deal financially, but they might as well be flushing that money down the drain. In San Francisco, where Live Water is sold, the water supply is perfectly drinkable, and costs around half a penny per gallon. Heck, you can buy distilled water, the purest form of the liquid, on Walmart.com for less than a dollar per gallon, from anywhere in the country. And if you’re that desperate for probiotics, do what everyone else does and eat some yogurt, instead of getting swindled by a new-age hippie grifter selling tap water in a pretty vase.

So if you're thirsty for "raw water" in San Francisco or L.A., you could buy a couple of jugs at the corner organic grocery. Or just take a road trip to Oregon and turn on a tap. It'd probably cost about the same.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io