Tactical Snake Oil Part 2: Chemical Analysis of Oral IV.

As some of my readers have likely noticed, I have had some serious issues with the product known as "Oral I.V.". Primarily, I find their claims of efficacy to be highly inflated, if not down-right fraudulent.

If nothing else, their claims stretch credulity and ignore science to a worrisome degree. 

In my previous installment, I addressed a number of their claims on the effect of their product.

Some of these claims appear to have disappeared from the vaults of the internet, but others still persist.

Despite the arguably hyperbolic claims, numerous luminaries of the tactical and military communities appear to have been sucked in by the aggressive marketing employed by Warrior Wound Care and Hydration Solutions, much to my dismay. 

Before we continue, I must give fair warning: by necessity, this article is both technical and lengthy. 

I will also state that neither I nor my research partner, Morgan Atwood, have any kind of financial interest in this testing. Neither one of us manufacture a competing product, we have not been paid to do this by a competitor, and all costs such as acquiring test material, have been borne entirely by Morgan Atwood and Yours Truly. We have received nothing in the way of compensation from any entity, be they a private individual or a corporation Our only motivation for writing this up and doing the testing has been, and continues to be, a deep-seated outrage that our troops are being sold what we believe to be snake oil, and rather expensive snake oil at that.

We finally decided that enough was enough, so we set out to learn exactly what was in Oral IV and if it could actually stand up to the claims made by its marketing team. We obtained our samples by buying a couple of four-packs from one of the numerous vendors. These packs were bought over an extended period of time, so, based on the time lapse between each purchase, it is likely that they came from different batches.

While we did use the product ourselves (and noticed no discernible effect), in order to avoid anecdotal testimony and its many perils, we decided to have a chemical analysis performed and with the contacts we had available, we were able to get access to some rather serious lab equipment at a highly regarded technical university.

Using an inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrograph, a device commonly used for soil analysis and forensics, we were able to analyze the contents of Oral IV, aided by a couple of friendly chemists specializing in water quality research (who asked to remain anonymous, to protect their university and ongoing research). The numbers that we discovered with this testing will be outlined below. I will throw in a spoiler here and say that these numbers are absolutely fantastic. For us they are the confirmation of our initial suspicions that this product is nothing more than over-priced snake-oil.

Let us back up a little and do a quick recap of what Oral IV claims to be really about. 

 Oral IV is marketed as a rapid rehydration supplement. Reportedly containing 11-12  trace minerals in purified water (the listing differs from website to website), it offers a laundry list of claims, all of which are extremely spurious in nature, largely ignoring any and all actual science when it comes to physiology and cellular biology. It is supposedly also an "ultra concentrate".

Those claims are all out-lined and de-bunked in my previous article. You can read that here.

So let us move briskly on to the actual test results. What is going to follow below boils down to an analysis of the concentration and mineral content of Oral IV. You will later see two comparisons that we feel are pertinent: one is for Gatorade, the other will be based on a USGS survey of Bernalillo County, NM, tap water. All numbers will be in milligrams per liter (mg/L). Below is a list of the actual element concentrations found in our samples of Oral IV.

Element	Reported Concentration
Ba (Barium)	0.007
Ca (Calcium)	1.414
Fe (Iron)	0.026
K (Potassium)	0.115
Li (Lithium)	0.011
Mg (Magnesium)	0.077
Mn (Manganese)	0.013
Na (Sodium)	396.700
P (Phosphorus)	0.269
S (Sulphur)	1.678
Sr (Strontium)	0.010
Cr (Chromium)	0.029
Co (Cobalt)	0.052

Bear in mind, these numbers are per LITER of fluid. Since Oral IV comes in a 15ml vial, typically in a four-pack, the actual amount that you get per dose is over 60 times less than the amounts you just saw. 

Below is the listing of minerals that are supposed to be in Oral IV, according to the Oral IV official website.

Copper (Cu)

Iodine (I)

Manganese (Mn)

Zinc (Zn)

Potassium (K)

Cobalt (Co)

Sodium (Na)

Selenium (Se)

Chromium (Cr)

Silica (Si)

Boron (B)

Magnesium (Mg) *This last one is a possible. Whether it appears in the official ingredient list depends entirely on which website you look at.*

I received this package on 07JUN2013. Note that this appears to be an older package as it only mentions 11 minerals and RHTR, LLC , the latter of which is no longer associated with Oral IV or Warrior Wound Care. Also worth noting, there is no expiration date or date of manufacture anywhere on the packaging. 

As you can see, what our testing actually discovered was rather different than the official listing. Now, some of those discrepancies can potentially be explained by the concentrations simply being too small to actually measure. The other elements present are harder to explain. Of particular note, though, is the presence of Barium, as in its water-soluble form, Barium is quite toxic. Luckily, the amounts found here were quite small.

Let us look at Gatorade. 

We did not have this product tested, so we are only using the information Gatorade has released (which amounts to what they print on their product labels). Because of this, we can only compare the concentrations for sodium and potassium. I am not too worried about this, as sodium alone is one of the primary electrolytes that  is involved in fluid regulation in your body. Not that the other ones are not important as well, but they play a much smaller role. We are using the original formula Gatorade here, which is currently sold under their "Perform" label. Their website is here: Gatorade. Below are the levels of sodium (Na) and potassium (K) reportedly in Gatorade Perform.

Na: 450.7 mg/L

K: 126.8 mg/L

Gatorade also reportedly contains 59.15 grams of carbohydrates per liter, and while the presence of glucose and/or its polymers do speed up fluid uptake in the human gut, it is not entirely pertinent for this comparison. 

What we DO see here is that while the sodium numbers are close - 396.7mg/L for Oral IV and 450.7mg/L for Gatorade - the amount of potassium is vastly lower in Oral IV. 

Moving on to the USGS survey. 

In this USGS survey, they sampled a number of water sources in the Bernalillo County area. I selected the first three of these sources as a representative sample. 

Sampled Well																					Calcium (mg/L as Ca)	Magnesium (mg/L as Mg)	Sodium (mg/L as Na)	Potassium (mg/L as K)	Silica (mg/L as SiO2)	Nitrate (mg/L as N)	Alumi­num (mg/L as Al)	Arsenic (mg/L as As)	Copper (mg/L as Cu)	Iron (mg/L as Fe)	Manganese (mg/L as Mn)	Zinc (mg/L as Zn)
Charles 2																					41.1	3.9	23.3	1.6	31.4	0.44	0.003	0.002	0.0005	0.007	0.001	0.0066
Duranes 6																					51.6	12.1	42.5	9.5	69.6	0.05	0.003	0.004	0.0005	0.021	0.003	0.001
Leavitt 2																					4.4	0.5	102.4	1.2	29.1	1.28	0.003	0.033	0.0005	0.003	0.001	0.001

*You can find the full text here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2006/5171/ Information used above was taken from the table on page 7.* 

Note here the concentrations of sodium and potassium. While the sodium concentration is about four times lower than that found in Oral IV, the potassium concentration in the tap water is notably higher. For instance, looking at the Duranes well, there is 82 times more potassium in the water from that well than you would find in Oral IV.
Below is a bar chart that compares the levels of minerals that municipal tap water has in common with Oral IV. As already addressed, the sodium is much higher in Oral IV, but note that you only get that much if you drink a full liter of Oral IV. In reality, you will be ingesting less than 6mg of sodium per dose according to our testing, and less than 1mg if you go by what Oral IV has recently published. Also worth noting are the differences in potassium and calcium. Please click to expand.

Note also that Oral IV recommends adding each vial to 16 to 20 ounces of water. If you use the 16 ounce suggestion, you will be further diluting Oral IV another 31 times. Each vial of Oral IV - being only 15ml - contains under 6mg of sodium and a diminutive amount of the other minerals, minerals that, by the information actually published by the manufacturer, should not even be present in their product. Of course, even their own web pages do not seem to agree on exactly which minerals are supposed to be present in their product. On one of the several websites run by whoever actually owns Oral IV, one page claims 11 minerals, another page claims 12, adding magnesium to the list (images below are screen grabs that show a recent change in their stated claims). We find these inconsistencies troubling and downright alarming when you look at the minerals that are not only NOT in the product as claimed, but also the minerals that are not supposed to even be in the product!

A Google cache search found a recent trawl of the ORAL IV site from 28MAY2013. 

Notice here the list of only 11 minerals with no mention of levels. 

And here you can see the altered information. A minor nitpick here, "silica" is not an electrolyte. A mineral, yes, but not an electrolyte. 

This is the current information as of 06JUN2013. This entry in their FAQ also counts as the first time we have ever seen them list any levels at all. Note that their reported levels conflict with the numbers our lab reported. . 

To sum up, the results of this test confirmed all of my suspicions that we had formed from reading the promotional material released about Oral IV. 

There is now no doubt in our minds that, in our opinion,  Oral IV is a complete and utter scam. Their claims for its efficacy are not just somewhat dubious but outright lies.

I find it extremely telling that the two "physicians" whose names repeatedly come up in connection with this product are both doctors of naturopathy with specializations in other fields of dubious scientific validity, such as Oriental Medicine (acupuncture) and Orthomolecular Medicine. 
I also believe that Oral IV appears to be in violation of FDA rules regarding the labeling of dietary supplements, as they provide no listing of ingredients nor an expiration date. You can read those rules here: FDA.GOV

When we attempted to approach the company responsible for manufacturing Oral IV, we encountered a maze of companies and names, most of which have no real web presence. We found various distributors, trademark holders, people holding numerous positions in multiple different companies, and supposed contact numbers for higher-ups in a particular company, that when tracked down turned out to be a phone number for a completely different company, and none of these numbers were readily available. It is positively Byzantine.
We jokingly discussed creating a flow-chart just to keep track of the companies and people involved in Oral IV.

We initially approached Warrior Wound Care, because they used to be the company solely responsible for marketing and distribution. That appears to no longer be the case. When we contacted them for comment on our findings, they essentially passed the buck on to Oral IV, which is now apparently a separate entity, run by a family of companies known as the Hudson Group. The Oral IV site says "Hudson Global Group", but a web search of that does not result in anything useful.
When we finally did get in touch with a managing partner, a Mr. Brian Miller, things got weird.
Within minutes of explaining why we were calling him, he offered to fly us out to San Diego so that we could "meet the team" and experience Oral IV for ourselves, including a test of our own blood after using their product. Mr. Miller suggested that they would videotape the blood testing so that we could see the "transformation" with our own eyes.

It seemed extremely odd to us that this company would so readily commit hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars just to appease  "some bloggers". Frankly, it smelled of an attempt to win us over. We chose to decline this offer, as we were not keen to potentially get into a situation where it could be said that we took a pay-off. 
They also requested a large amount of information, not just about our backgrounds, but also about the lab itself, the name of the chemical engineer that did our testing, who paid for the testing and how much was paid for the test. Furthermore, I was contacted by their Director of Communications, Sandy Moul, who re-stated the offer to fly us out to California, but was even more aggressive in her requests for the above mentioned information. Also, according to Mr. Miller, Dr. Anthony G. Beck, the inventor of the product was supposedly going to "reach out" to us, but such contact never occurred. We left numerous messages with a variety of people, all in an attempt to talk directly with the inventor, but to no avail.

And then we encountered our first "shill" - an antagonistic commenter on my original Oral IV article, asking essentially the exact same questions as the Oral IV team, who, upon a quick web search, turned out to be personal friends with Dr. Beck. 

We were also contacted by the Director of Operations at Warrior Wound Care, who explained to us that Warrior Wound Care was not now, nor has ever been responsible for formulating and packaging Oral IV. Fair enough, we stand corrected on that count.

While requesting biographical information about my partner and I is fine - we have nothing to hide when it comes to our backgrounds - we were not in a position to disclose the identity of the chemists at the lab that tested this product for us. As mentioned previously, they specifically requested to not be named when we did this write-up. We have no choice but to respect their wishes. And frankly, supposedly wanting to open a dialogue with the testing lab seemed an odd response. If I were a manufacturer, my first response would have been to check with my Quality Control people and have them go over their most recent test data. Surely, as a manufacturer of a consumable nutritional supplement, regular testing of their product should be a standard procedure, should it not?

In summary, if we were skeptical about the product before, that skepticism has now bloomed into full-on distrust. Our test results, combined with the sleight-of-hand corporate structure, unsubtle attempts at discrediting us, and the insane level of hyperbolic quackery, there is no doubt in our minds that you would be doing yourself a huge disfavor by relying on this product to do anything other than provide you with an extra 15ml of tap water, at the low, low price of 183 dollars per liter.
Based not only on our own test results, but also on the recently published information from the manufacturer, Oral IV will NOT replace any significant amount of electrolytes and if you rely on it for extended duration exercise, you run the very real risk of suffering from hyponatremia, hypokalemia, or even hypomagnesemia, which can be life-threatening conditions. According to our testing, it does not even contain the minerals that they say it does, and the ones that we did find were in amounts so low as to be of no significance.
To further examine our results, we intend to perform additional In Vivo testing, which we plan to record on video. We will publish those tests in a separate article.

There are dozens of other electrolyte supplements on the market and all of them - as far as we have seen so far - report their levels of electrolytes and other ingredients. Some of them may have more or less desirable ingredients, some have sugar, others do not. But they all report what is in them and you can - as an educated consumer - choose which product to use, based on the available information, unlike Oral IV.
If you wish, despite our findings, you can even continue using Oral IV. We would not recommend it. 

Tactical Snake Oil Part 2: Chemical Analysis of Oral IV. by Ian Wendt & Morgan Atwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.