There’s no shortage of fishy wellness trends out there, but this latest one might take the cake. A notorious health influencer named Matt Roeske has recently made waves for drinking water out of an apparently radioactive jug.
In an Instagram post released last week under his wellness brand Cultivate Elevate, Roeske touted the supposed curative benefits of radium water. He went as far as touching and drinking from a container that appeared to set off a radiation detector, claiming he had done so for 250 days.
Of course, there is absolutely zero evidence that radium water is good for you, and such products were regulated out of existence about a century ago due to the serious, even fatal, complications they caused—a fact that Roeske seemingly blamed on a globalist conspiracy to suppress miracle cures.
“In 1933 when the Rothschilds FDA came along the first thing they went after was radium water… not vaxxines [sic], dirty electricity, or pesticides,” he wrote in the captions accompanying the video.
The dangers of radium water
Radium is a naturally occurring, highly radioactive element that emits several types of ionizing radiation as it decays. Following its discovery by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie in the late 1800s, it was widely used in cosmetics and medicine.
By the early 20th century, radium water was one of many so-called patent medicines: over-the-counter and unregulated products advertised to have all sorts of health uses. Some of these products were sold as tonics with radium already added, while others were drinking containers lined with radium. Roeske’s jug seems to be one of the latter, a popular brand made out of ceramic known as the Revigator (also called the Revigorator). These products were marketed with taglines such as restoring water’s “lost element of original freshness—radioactivity.”
Radium was no miracle, however. Long-term exposure to high levels of radium can raise people’s risk of bone, liver, or breast cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Very high doses of radium can also cause acute and fatal radiation poisoning, a lesson that was horrifically illustrated by the experiences of the “Radium Girls”—women who worked at a factory in the 1910s and 1920s that used radium to create glow-in-the-dark paint for watches and dials.
In 1933, doctors formally detailed the case of Eben Byers, a wealthy industrialist and amateur golf champion. A year earlier, Byers died at the age of 51 from severe radium exposure. Byers was a prolific fan of Radithor, a distilled water product laced with radium salts, and he reportedly consumed roughly 1,300 bottles of Radithor in his lifetime. As a result, he developed jawbone cancer so aggressive that doctors eventually had to remove the lower half of his face.
Byers’ case led to the Federal Trade Commission cracking down on Radithor (prior to his death, Byers even gave testimony against the product’s maker). And in 1938, the federal government passed a law strengthening the regulatory power of the FTC and the recently rechristened Food and Drug Administration, allowing them to finally take stronger action against patent medicines.
So no, contrary to Roeske’s post, the FDA did not ban Revigator and other radium water products out of deference to its Jewish masters (members of the Rothschild family, though a real banking dynasty in Europe, are often the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracies that portray them and other powerful Jewish people as secretly running the world).
A history of outlandish claims
Roeske’s love of radioactive water is hardly the only example of his quackery. Among many other dubious things, Roeske has claimed that viruses and other germs don’t exist; that peanut allergies are caused by vaccines laced with peanut oil; and that removing wisdom teeth causes heart problems. And last week’s post isn’t even the first time he’s boosted radium water.
Honestly, I wouldn’t advise anyone to spend their free time browsing his posts. Trying to wade through the many different conspiracies on his page feels like the online equivalent of staring directly at the Sun. But unfortunately, his particular brand of woo isn’t falling on deaf ears either. At last count, Cultivate Elevate’s Instagram has over a half-million followers.
Radium water might not be popular anymore, but there are always people willing to believe anything.
