Why We Make No Health Claims

Why we make no health claims

We sell water. We will tell you exactly what is in it, exactly how it was made, exactly where it was made, and exactly what an independent laboratory measured in the batch you are about to buy.

We will not tell you what it will do for you.

That is a deliberate decision, not a gap in our marketing. This page explains the decision, because we would rather you understood it than assumed we were being coy.

What the law actually says

Bottled water is a food. In Australia it is regulated under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, and food laws are monitored and enforced by state and territory government departments, by the Commonwealth agriculture department for imported food, and in New Zealand by the Ministry for Primary Industries (Getting Your Claims Right, the regulators' own guide). It is not a therapeutic good and it is not regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

Health claims on food are governed by Standard 1.2.7 of the Food Standards Code. The Standard sets out which claims may be made and on what conditions. A general level health claim must either use a food-health relationship pre-approved in Schedule 4, or be self-substantiated through a systematic review conducted under Schedule 6 and notified to the Chief Executive Officer of Food Standards Australia New Zealand, who publishes the notification on a public register. A high level health claim, one referring to a serious disease or a biomarker of one, cannot be self-substantiated at all. It must use a relationship already in Schedule 4, of which there are currently thirteen (FSANZ). None of them concerns deuterium-depleted water, and we have not self-substantiated one.

Beyond that sits a harder line. The moment a product is advertised as preventing, curing, alleviating or managing a disease, it can be captured as a therapeutic good under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989, regardless of the fact that it is water in a bottle. Under section 28 of the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code, a form of a disease is a serious form if it is medically accepted as requiring diagnosis, treatment or supervision by a suitably qualified health practitioner, or if there is a diagnostic or screening test for it that requires medical interpretation or follow-up. A representation about a serious form of a disease is a restricted representation, and section 42DD of the Act requires the Secretary's approval before it may be used in advertising. Most of the conditions people ask us about are serious forms under that test.

And underneath all of it sits the Australian Consumer Law, which prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct and false representations about a product's performance or benefits. The ACCC's position is that claims must be true, accurate and based on reasonable grounds, that a business must be able to prove any claim it advertises, and that it makes no difference whether a business intends to mislead or not. A claim you cannot substantiate is a breach even if it is sincerely believed and even if it turns out to be true.

So the short version: we could not lawfully tell you that this water will do anything for your health. Neither can anyone else selling bottled water in Australia.

The part nobody explains: why the evidence does not exist

The obvious question is why nobody has simply run the studies and settled it.

The answer is not scientific. It is economic, and it is worth understanding because it applies to a great deal more than water.

Substantiating a health claim requires a body of human evidence, and producing one costs an enormous amount of money. A self-substantiated claim under Standard 1.2.7 is not a matter of opinion. It requires a systematic review, and a systematic review requires human trials to review. Those trials are expensive. One analysis of the pivotal trials supporting new drug approvals in the United States put the median cost of a single trial at about US$19 million, with half of them falling between US$12 million and US$33 million and the most expensive above US$300 million (Moore, Zhang, Anderson and Alexander, JAMA Internal Medicine 2018, doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.3931). Across a full development programme, including the cost of everything that fails along the way, the median capitalised investment behind a new medicine has been estimated at roughly US$985 million, with a mean of about US$1.3 billion (Wouters, McKee and Luyten, JAMA 2020, doi:10.1001/jama.2020.1166). Those are not numbers a beverage company can reach.

Someone will spend that money only if they can own the result. The commercial logic of clinical research depends on exclusivity. A company funds a trial because a patent means that, if the trial succeeds, it has a protected period in which to recover the investment. Take away the patent and the arithmetic collapses: you would be spending a fortune to prove something that any competitor could then sell on the day your results were published.

Water is not patentable. Neither is the underlying chemistry. Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, present in all water on earth. Isotope separation is nearly a century old. There is nothing here to own.

So the funding never arrives. What exists instead is what the research world produces when there is no commercial sponsor: laboratory work, animal studies, mechanistic hypotheses, and a small number of human trials that are small, short, and mostly conducted in specific patient populations under supervision. Alongside that there is a genuine sceptical literature arguing the effects are overstated or absent.

This is not a scandal and it is not a conspiracy. It is the ordinary consequence of how medical research is funded, and it affects everything that cannot be owned: repurposed generic medicines, dietary patterns, exercise, sunlight, sleep. The absence of a large trial is not evidence that something works. It is also not evidence that it does not. It is evidence that nobody had a commercial reason to find out.

What follows from that is simple. The evidence required to substantiate a health claim under Standard 1.2.7 does not exist for deuterium-depleted water. Therefore no such claim can lawfully be made. If a seller in this category tells you their water helps with a named condition, they are not in possession of evidence you have not seen. There is no such evidence.

What making a claim would cost us

There is a version of this business that makes claims quietly, is never noticed, and sells more water. We understand the temptation. Here is why we are not doing it.

We intend to still be here in ten years, and we intend for you to still be able to buy this water.

The people who buy Yavelle are not casual customers. Many have built a daily routine around it and want to know that the same water, at the same specification, will be there next month and next year. That continuity is the single most valuable thing we can offer, and it is the thing a regulatory problem destroys fastest.

A brand that makes therapeutic claims is a brand living on borrowed time. When the regulator arrives, the outcome is not a stern letter. It is mandated withdrawal of advertising, potentially of product, retail partners exiting the category, and in serious cases penalties large enough to end a small business. The customers who lose most are the ones who depended on the supply.

We are not willing to put your supply at risk in exchange for better conversion on a landing page. That is the whole reasoning. It is not noble, it is just arithmetic over a longer horizon than a quarter.

So what do we actually stand behind?

Everything we say about this product is a fact about the product, measurable and checked.

A specification. Yavelle is produced to 25 parts per million deuterium, against roughly 150 parts per million in ordinary drinking water.

Independent verification, every batch. Every batch is tested by an independent isotope laboratory before it goes on sale, and we publish the certificate. We label the specification we guarantee, not the best number we have ever seen, so the certificate is usually better than the label.

Full disclosure of what is in it. Distilled water, potassium bicarbonate, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride. No sugar, sweeteners, flavours, preservatives or caffeine.

Where it was made. The United States. Stated plainly, on the label and on every product page.

A guarantee. If you are not glad you bought it, you get your money back.

That is the entire offer. It is a smaller offer than some of our competitors make. It is also all of it true.

Where our water is made, and why it is not made here

We are asked this often, so here is the plain answer.

To the best of our knowledge there is no deuterium depletion facility in Australia.

Depleting deuterium is not filtration and it is not purification. Deuterium is chemically identical to ordinary hydrogen and differs only in mass, so no filter removes it. Carbon filters, ceramic filters, reverse osmosis and ordinary distillation all leave it exactly where it was. The only method is repeated industrial isotope separation, typically low temperature vacuum rectification in fractionating columns that can stand many metres tall and run thousands of sequential stages. It is heavy industrial infrastructure and it is enormously energy intensive.

There are only a handful of such facilities in the world. The ones we are aware of are in the United States, Hungary, Romania, Russia and China. None of them is in Australia, and to the best of our knowledge none has ever been.

So any deuterium-depleted water sold in Australia was manufactured overseas and brought here. That is true of ours and it is true of everyone else's. The only real questions are which country, and whether the seller will tell you.

Ours is made in the USA. We ship it to Australia, we hold stock here, and we deliver domestically at no charge. It costs us more than the alternatives and we have decided it is worth it.

We would rather tell you that plainly than let you assume something else.

How to read anyone's claims, including ours

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Apply the same test to us that you apply to everyone.

  1. Does the seller name a specific disease or condition? If a food or beverage brand tells you their product helps with a named illness, they are outside what Australian law permits, and they do not have evidence you have not seen.
  2. Is there a number attached to a benefit, and is it cited? A figure like "up to 50% more of something" is either supported by a specific study you can go and read, or it is invented.
  3. If there is a citation, does it exist and does it say what they claim? Look up the DOI. It takes thirty seconds. You will be surprised how often this fails.
  4. Do the studies involve humans, and how many? Findings in cells, worms and mice are interesting and are not evidence of an effect in people.
  5. Which single country was the water manufactured in? Not bottled in, not packed in, not distributed from. Manufactured in.
  6. Can you see the full laboratory certificate as a document? Not a cropped screenshot. A certificate should carry the laboratory, the method, the batch identifier, the date and the measurement uncertainty.
  7. Does the batch number on the bottle match the certificate?
  8. What happens if you are not satisfied? A policy saying all sales are final does not override your consumer guarantees under Australian law, and a seller who writes that either does not know that or hopes you do not.

In one paragraph

Deuterium-depleted water has a real research literature and a real sceptical literature. The human trials are small. The evidence required to make a health claim under Australian law does not exist, largely because water cannot be patented and so nobody has a commercial reason to fund the research that would produce it. We therefore make no health claims, and we would not make them even if we thought we could. What we do instead is publish the specification, publish the independent certificate for every batch before we sell it, tell you that the water is made in the USA, and give you your money back if you are not glad you bought it. Read the literature yourself and make your own decision. We would rather have a customer who decided than one who was persuaded.

Sources

Yavelle 25ppm Deuterium-Depleted Water is a packaged food. It is not a therapeutic good and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Information on this page is general and is not medical advice. If you have a health condition or are undergoing treatment, speak with a qualified health practitioner.

The information on this page is general information about Australian food and advertising regulation and is not legal advice. Last reviewed August 2026.