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Jul 16, 2023

WaterTok: You get it free from the tap, so why is TikTok so obsessed with jazzing up your H2O?

FoodTok, the corner of TikTok devoted to food and food trends, started to take

FoodTok, the corner of TikTok devoted to food and food trends, started to take off during the first Covid-19 lockdowns and has since delivered us a wealth of questionable food trends including Dalgona coffee (which made iced coffee more complicated), butter boards (which made eating bread and butter more complicated), tinned fish night (which made date night perhaps less complicated, but also stinkier), and four ingredient feta pasta (actually very simple and delicious and you should try it if you haven't).

TikTokkers, it seems, can jazz up any food product for views and likes, and if you need further proof of that I present to you FoodTok's latest obsession: #WaterTok.

Yes, water, as in the stuff that comes free out of your tap.

The trend – and it's a decent one, with videos bearing the hashtag amassing over 350 million views – is ostensibly about making water more palatable and therefore easier for people to drink enough of to be adequately hydrated, but it's not without concerns. Here's what you need to know.

WaterTok's origins appear to lie in another TikTok sub-culture: weightloss. Specifically, the trend began with people who had had bariatric surgery and were now under orders to drink up to 3L of water per day.

Prompted by TikTokker Tonya Spanglo, who shares her weightloss journey and her "Water of the Day" with just shy of 1 million followers under the handle @takingmylifebackat42, they began flavouring their water with sugar-free syrups and powders to make it more palatable.

It's since drifted over into the broader health and wellbeing spaces, with users, usually young women, filming themselves concocting the likes of "Birthday Cake Water" and "Little Mermaid Water" then drinking them out of Stanley cups, in a bid to consume enough fluid.

It's more difficult in New Zealand, where we don't have the same array of flavourings available that they do in the US, WaterTok's homeland.

TikTokkers typically make this particular flavour by adding either a few pumps of sugar-free birthday cake syrup, or a combination of candy floss, vanilla and almond flavoured syrups, to their water.

We might not have these exact flavours on our supermarket shelves but brands like Soda Stream ensure there are flavoured syrups readily available, while various online stores will ship WaterTokkers’ preferred powders – flavours like Skittles, Jolly Rancher, Nerds and Kool-Aid, all sugar-free of course – to Aotearoa.

Of course in New Zealand we also have cordials, which are less common in the US.

This is a tricky one, says nutritionist Nikki Hart.

"Anything that encourages people to stay hydrated has to be a good thing," she says, "that's my bottom line, and we know sometimes people get turned off by the blandness of water".

However, she points out, the World Health Organisation has issued warnings about non-nutritive sweeteners, or artificial sweeteners, due to research that has shown they can interfere with the natural microflora of the gut.

Hart also has concerns about the impact of non-nutritive sweeteners on teeth.

"When we deal with athletes who drink commercial sports drinks, they’re encouraged to squirt into their mouths and then rinse with water so the carbohydrates (in the drink) are not lingering around in their mouth," she says.

But Hart's principle objection to the WaterTok trend has to do with the sweet flavour, which "confuses the brain's receptors", she says, and just makes us crave more sweets.

"We know non-nutritive sweeteners are not essential dietary factors, they have no nutritional value, and we should be getting people to reduce their desire for sweetness," she says.

"There's all these wonderful initiatives where we’re putting fountains in cities and we want people to drink more water plain water... I’d rather you just drink plain water."