It’s that time of year again, folks, when I let loose and go on some unhinged innovation rants. We all need a way to manage our cortisol levels, and this is mine. Cheaper than a spa, worse for my blood pressure.

Fair warning: this one is longer than usual because some products merely annoyed me, while others opened a portal to a full grievance tribunal. There are raves in here too, I promise. But yes, the banana water section got away from me, and frankly, I stand by it.

As always, you get a say in this. I’d love to hear what you think about these products. And call me out on my BS views too. I contain multitudes, and some of them are very wrong. 

There are some raves in here too, I promise. Some brands are doing clever, useful, genuinely fun things.

Okay, now, gloves off…

INDIA

I stumbled upon this product as an ad on YouTube. Who pays attention to shady YT ads, you ask? I do, apparently, especially when phrases like “lung detox” make my eye twitch.

Purple Life Sciences’ Broncho Boost is a sachet of herbal powder that makes a pitch for “lung health” and city life, with claims around healthy breathing, throat and airway comfort, and “improved lung detox”.

Already, no.

The really egregious bit is who it’s targeted at – urban commuters, smokers, passive smokers, and “asthma & bronchial patients”. Where do I even start?

Take a deep breath.

First of all, the lungs are not a clogged drain that needs cleaning powder. They are self-healing organs, supported by cilia and immune cells. And pulmonologists and the American Lung Association are pretty clear that supplements, teas, essential oils, salts, et al promising “lung detox” should be treated with healthy suspicion.

Secondly, look closely at the ingredient infographic. Ginger is credited with enhancing “glucose uptake via GLUT4 activation”, eucalyptus with lowering “post-meal glucose spikes”, and purple corn with boosting “insulin sensitivity”.

Those are blood-sugar claims.

On a lung product.

Why??

Probably because the company also sells a diabetes supplement called DiaB Max. And 5 of Broncho Boost’s 6 botanicals (purple corn, turmeric, ginger, eucalyptus, lemongrass) are the identical CO₂ extracts inside it. My theory is that they lifted the copy straight off their diabetes line and forgot to change it.

To be fair, the supercritical CO₂ extraction they tout is legitimate tech.

Ginger, lemongrass, turmeric, and eucalyptus are perfectly pleasant botanicals. A warm ginger-lemongrass drink can soothe your throat. Eucalyptus or menthol can make breathing feel easier when you have a cold. And antioxidants and polyphenols are pretty good for the body in general. But that is not “lung detox”. And it certainly is not respiratory care for someone with asthma.

“Detox” is the most abused word in the wellness aisle, and pollution anxiety is fast becoming the new sugar high for functional-product marketing, especially in India. And I get it. I may not live in Delhi, but the AQI levels where I do live are often high enough for some real anxiety.

But this is not the way to go.

JAPAN

USA

Here’s another product that made me see red, fitting since the liquid itself is a very disconcerting shade of pink (to their credit, the company does have a disclaimer about this).

Let me get my conflict of interest out of the way first: Banagua was voted Best New Brand by Beverage Digest in early 2026 and just landed US$5.5 million from a VC firm. So my little meltdown here is going to look a lot like sour grapes.

Fair.

But let me be precise about what my grouse actually is, because it isn’t really the product, ridiculous as I find it. It’s the sustainability halo that’s been draped over it. Strip that away and I’d have rolled my eyes and scrolled on. But that didn’t happen, so here we are.

First, what this is NOT: banana-flavored water, which is what I assumed at a glance and was not in the least intrigued by.

No, here, “the bananas are steamed and mashed to release their naturally nutrient-rich water. Using a cutting-edge, high-integrity extraction process…” yada yada yada. Gross, frankly, but who am I to yuck someone else’s yum? Maybe someone genuinely loves the stuff.

My objections start when the product starts presenting itself as simple, natural, and sustainable.

This banana water is positioned as an alternative to coconut, birch, or maple water, but it’s not really the same thing. Those waters exist in nature as is, you tap them straight from the source. This one relies on a cockamamy “proprietary enzyme-assisted extraction process” that isolates the water inside bananas. And if I’ve understood it correctly, that enzyme dissolves the very fiber that binds the banana together.

The company helpfully points out that bananas are roughly 75% water. Sure, but so are most fruits (more, actually). The whole point of a fruit with pulp is the fiber, and even a ripe banana has enough to skate by. In the age of fibermaxxing, why on earth would you engineer it out?

An aside: how much do you want to bet the next iteration of this product is a high-fiber, prebiotic, gut-healthy version?

Then there’s the “simple, single ingredient” positioning.

You take a perfectly good idea, exactly as the good gods and Mendelian genetics handed to us, put it through a complex series of processes, can the liquid\, and ship those heavy, liquid-filled aluminum cans clear from Thailand. And then you have the nerve to print “No funny stuff” on the pack.

You know what’s a simple single ingredient with no funny stuff? The damn banana.

The sustainability angle is where my patience started thinning dangerously.

Let’s start with planet-friendly packaging. Aluminum is recyclable, yes, but it is not more planet-friendly than a peel.

Then there’s the bit about heirloom bananas grown on regenerative, community-run farms in Thailand. Genuinely fabulous, but surely the carbon footprint of all that processing and shipping cancels it out? I’d like to see the company’s LCA.

By far my favorite, though, is the claim that this is a zero-waste manufacturing model. The company says they use as much of the fruit as possible, even scraping the peels for added nutrients (fiber, apparently, does not qualify as a nutrient). Byproducts are “reused or responsibly processed”. The biomass, supposedly, becomes biopolymer material that replaces single-use plastics. I’d love the details.

I came across another banana water maker called Woodstock Foods (yep, there’s more than one) that turns its byproduct into cutlery and bags. But why manufacture things designed to be thrown away? All you’ve done is add an energy-burning step to produce a disposable. How is that zero-waste?

This is exactly why we need proper, agreed-upon definitions for all these sustainability buzzwords.

In truth, I don’t know what byproducts the company is talking about or what they really do with them. But I suspect there isn’t much new going on, because if there were, we’d be hearing about that ad nauseum.

But here’s what genuinely gets me, because I know a thing or two about bananas. That plant is a massive waste stream, and a massive missed opportunity to make some serious moolah.

The banana stalk fruits only once and is then cut down. The pseudostem (the trunk) is 60-80% of the plant’s weight, and most of it is wasted, every year. Yet the core of that trunk is edible and exceptionally rich in dietary fiber. You’ll find it in just about any vegetable market in South India. It can also be dried and milled into a powder that boosts the fiber content of other foods, biscuits, for instance. The very fiber, note, that these banana water products spend what I imagine is a fortune dissolving.

The discarded trunk can also be made into textile fiber, hardly uncommon in India. A near-free resource, turned into high-value products that don’t have to be single-use. They can be reused – what a concept, no?

The leaves, while we’re at it, make wonderful biodegradable plates and flavorful wraps for cooking in.

These things have been done in India forever, and I’d wager Thailand and every other banana-growing community has its own roster of such practices. This is the kind of genuine resourcefulness that could actually offset the inanity of a banana water destined to fade, like every other unsustainable fad before it.

I’m so angry about this. If only they had left out that sustainability cover, I would have moved on with just a small scoff. But they didn’t.

And now, since I’ve clearly appointed myself chief grievance officer today, allow me one last, gloriously petty note: the name “Banagua”. Agua is Spanish for water. Lovely.

Except these bananas are Thai and the company’s in Nashville, so it’s the one language with no claim to anything here.

A small nod to the provenance would’ve been nice. And Thai practically gift-wraps it. Water is nam (น้ำ), the same root in nam nom, water of the breast for milk, and nam jai, water of the heart for kindness (of which I have none right now). The obvious name was sitting right there, unpeeled and ripe for the taking.

Bana-nam.

Boom. You’re welcome.

ISRAEL

NETHERLANDS

Now this one I love. Amsterdam just became the first capital city in the world to ban ads for meat and fossil fuels across public spaces, including billboards, bus shelters, the metro. The logic is clean. If the city wants to cut emissions, halve meat consumption, and become carbon-neutral by 2050, then maybe it should stop selling people the very things it is trying to reduce.

Genuinely, bravo! More of this, please.

But as this ruminated in my head, I wondered why dairy wasn’t part of this. Because every time the food-and-climate conversation comes up, meat and dairy are usually named in the same breath. Those damn burping, methane-producing cows and their atmospheric (at-moo-spheric?) crimes…

So I scanned the banned list again.

Meat: yes.

Fossil fuels: yes.

Dairy: nowhere.

Now, I’ve spent enough hours at trade shows working my way through Dutch cheese flights to know that dairy is an absolute cash cow for the Netherlands. So the omission smelled off. And, being the suspicious, paranoid weasel that I am, I went a-huntin’.

Turns out, that little insignificant omission was not an oversight. The ban was originally drafted to cover ALL animal products, dairy very much included. But dairy got quietly carved out in a compromise to secure the majority vote.

Convenient, because dairy and eggs are the Netherlands' single largest agri-food export category, worth EUR13.3 billion in 2025, comfortably ahead of meat at EUR12.1 billion. In a country still bruised from years of farmer protests over emissions rules, sparing the biggest export category is about as subtle as a cattle bell.

So, meat takes the climate hit while the cash cow grazes peacefully on.

And look, this isn’t me trashing the policy. It’s a genuine first, and other cities across Europe are getting ready for similar moves. Perfect can’t be the enemy of a real start.

But anyone who’s watched the farmer vote flex its muscle (not just in Dutch politics, but anywhere) knows a clean sweep was never on the table. Giving a pass to dairy was probably the price of getting anything passed. I’d be naive to pretend otherwise.

I’m just pointing to the thing under the thing.

We can ban the billboards for one cow product and protect the other, but the atmosphere won’t notice the distinction. Methane is methane.

The uncomfortable bit nobody’s selling on a billboard is the actual answer: if we want food and climate policy to work, at some point we need to produce and consume less of everything.

Less convenient than a poster ban, but probably also the only version that works.

UK