We’ve already seen Schapelle Corby do her best to try and derail 2018, but now it seems that the year is truly off to a bad start thanks to the fact that ‘raw water’ is inexplicably now a health trend.

According to a report from The New York Times, many people in places such as San Francisco are jumping at the chance to buy their water “off the grid”, and buying what has been called ‘raw water’.

So what is ‘raw water’? Well, basically, it’s water that hasn’t been filtered, treated, or sterilised – just like grandma used to make.

As Techly notes, a company called Live Water is one of the leading sellers of ‘raw water’, where they give folks the chance to buy a 9.4 litre bottle for about $47.25. In case you’re wondering, if you were to scale that down to the size of your average 600ml bottle of Mount Franklin, you’re paying about $3 a bottle.

So the question remains, just what is the benefit of it all? Well, if you’re to listen to the founder of Live Water, it sounds as though Big Water is just using good ol’ tap juice as an easy opportunity to keep you under their control.

“Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,” Mukhande Singh explained to The New York Times. “Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.”

On one hand, he is correct; many governments, including the Australian government, have been putting fluoride in the water supply for decades, but that’s been for the sake of dental health, not mind control (as far as we can tell).

On the other hand though, Singh is totally on the wrong track, forgetting that water is treated for the sake of preventing diseases spread through contaminated water. Basically, if you’e jumping on the raw water trend, you’d better hope you’ve got one heck of an immune system on your side.

So what’s going to happen? Will ‘raw water’ catch on in places like Australia, or will it just stay an American trend for now? Only time will tell, but history has shown that these trends tend to stick around for much longer than they reasonably should.