Hydrogen Water and the Future of Health: Why This "Too Good to Be True" Science Is Real
An interview with Josh Carr, CEO of Echo Water, recorded at CES in Las Vegas
A Different Kind of Health Story
The host of this show lost 100 pounds. He didn't do it by finding the right drug. He did it after a diabetes diagnosis forced him to confront something most people never want to admit: you can't pharmaceutical your way to health.
"My A1Cs would go lower, and then they'd start going higher as you become accustomed to the drug," he explains. The medications weren't solving the problem — they were managing a symptom while the underlying issue continued.
That realization led him toward nutrition, muscle, movement, sleep — the lifestyle fundamentals that modern medicine too often treats as secondary to the prescription pad. And it's what made him genuinely curious about hydrogen water when Echo Water CEO Josh Carr came on the show at CES.
Josh had an almost identical turning point. His came in the form of a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis.
Living With a Disease That Turns Your Spine to Stone
Ankylosing spondylitis is a genetic form of inflammatory arthritis that fuses the major joints over time. Left unchecked, it can eventually fuse the spine itself, causing people to become permanently hunched. The name roughly translates from Latin as "spine of stone."
Josh had been managing it with heavy doses of steroids. The steroids brought their own problems — weight gain, mood changes, fatigue, the characteristic "moon face" from prolonged use. And while they dulled the pain, they weren't fixing anything.
"I hadn't gone upstairs in my house in three years," Josh recalls. He was in and out of crutches. Stairs looked impossible. Something as simple as dropping his wallet on the floor required him to calculate whether it was worth the pain to pick it up.
He'd also tried everything the alternative health world had to offer — CBD, bee pollen, various holistic interventions. Nothing moved the needle enough. When your inflammation is that severe, he explains, most natural solutions simply can't bridge the gap.
Then Paul Barattiero — Echo Water's founder and his future business partner — found out about Josh's condition and told him to try hydrogen water.
Josh's reaction was immediate and predictable: skepticism.
The Skeptic's Journey
Josh describes himself as someone who needs things proven before he believes them. His first thought when hearing about hydrogen water was: if this actually worked, pharmaceutical companies would have already found a way to monetize it. He'd also been on the receiving end of well-meaning friends offering every imaginable remedy, none of which had helped.
He drank the water anyway — but only to be polite. They had a meeting coming up in two weeks, and he wanted to be able to say honestly that he'd tried it.
A week in, something was different.
"When you drop something on the floor, you have to determine the value of it to bend over and get it, because it hurts too much," he says. "And all of a sudden I would just bend over and pick something up. I'm like — wait. I just picked up my wallet. I didn't kick it first or stare at it. I just picked it up."
He called Paul. Paul sent him a stack of research. Josh dug in — through the National Institutes of Health database, through aggregated study collections — and came to a conclusion he hadn't expected: this is real. And the bigger question became: why doesn't everyone know about this?
To test whether it was placebo, he stopped taking it and waited. Within four or five days, his back pain returned and his sleep deteriorated. He repeated the experiment. Same result.
He's been drinking it ever since, and eventually joined the company as CEO.
What Hydrogen Water Actually Is — and Why It Works
The core concept is simple once you understand where the body's hydrogen is supposed to come from in the first place.
Your body naturally produces hydrogen through fermentation in the gut. When you eat fiber-rich foods — kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, whole vegetables — the fiber breaks down during digestion and produces hydrogen gas as a byproduct. Your body then uses that hydrogen as a primary antioxidant.
The problem is that most people today have compromised gut health. Between antibiotic overuse, pesticides, processed food, and chronic stress, the gut's ability to produce adequate hydrogen has been significantly diminished. Meanwhile, the body's need for it doesn't go away.
Echo Water's products deliver hydrogen directly, using electrolysis to separate water molecules and dissolve H₂ gas back into the water. The body absorbs the hydrogen through the gut — the same pathway it would use if the gut were producing it naturally.
Why does hydrogen work so well as an antioxidant? Two reasons stand out:
Size. Hydrogen is the smallest element on the periodic table. To put it in perspective: if you scaled a cell up to the size of a soccer stadium, something like vitamin C would fill the entire stadium. A hydrogen molecule would be a single drop of water in that space. This means hydrogen can reach parts of the cell — including the mitochondria — that no other antioxidant can access.
Selectivity. Most antioxidants are indiscriminate. They neutralize all oxidative processes, including the ones your body actually needs. Hydrogen is a selective antioxidant — it only binds to the harmful free radicals, the ones causing oxidative stress, while leaving beneficial oxidative processes untouched. When a harmful free radical is present, the hydrogen simply bonds to it, neutralizes it, and the problem is resolved quickly and cleanly.
The chain looks like this: oxidative stress leads to inflammation. Inflammation leads to disease. Reduce oxidative stress, and you reduce inflammation. Reduce inflammation, and many of the symptoms and conditions people struggle with begin to improve.
"If It Helps Everything, It Sounds Too Good to Be True"
Josh acknowledges this is one of his biggest challenges in talking about hydrogen water. When researchers have studied its effects across different systems and organs, almost every one has shown improvement. That's a statement that immediately raises suspicion — it sounds like the kind of claim that belongs on a late-night infomercial.
His response is a simple analogy: what happens if you're deficient in oxygen? Everything goes wrong, everywhere, all at once. Your systems don't fail one at a time — they all need oxygen, so a deficiency affects all of them.
Hydrogen deficiency works the same way, just more subtly. You don't pass out — you wake up stiff. You have brain fog. Your hormones are off. You're fatigued for no clear reason. You don't connect these symptoms to a single cause the way you would with oxygen, because hydrogen's role isn't as visible. But the mechanism is the same.
There are now between 1,500 and 1,800 published studies on hydrogen and health. Echo Water is currently conducting a large human trial with Dr. Andy Galpin from Parker University — one of the most well-known researchers in human performance — specifically linking their products to measurable outcomes.
Hydrogen as the Foundation Layer
One of Josh's most useful framings is thinking about water not as a health product but as a delivery system.
Every supplement, every nutrient, every medication you take moves through your body via water. The quality of that water affects how well everything else gets absorbed and utilized. Most people spend significant time and money optimizing what they're putting into their bodies — supplements, protein, electrolytes — without ever thinking about the medium delivering all of it.
He uses a pointed analogy: imagine a company obsessing over what goes in the box and what the box is made of, while still delivering everything by Pony Express. The foundation layer — the delivery mechanism — hasn't been touched.
Hydrogen water, he argues, improves the delivery system itself. It doesn't replace what you're already doing; it makes everything else work better.
This was the conversation he was having at CES with soft drink manufacturers and sports nutrition brands. Nobody has seriously considered enhancing the water that carries their electrolytes, rather than just optimizing the electrolytes themselves.
Athletes Were First
Elite athletes tend to be early adopters of anything that offers a performance edge — and they've been using hydrogen water for a while.
The research supports why. Studies on cyclists show endurance and performance improvements when hydrogen water is consumed as a pre-workout drink (around 30 minutes before exercise). Recovery times also improve significantly, which matters as much as the workout itself for athletes training at high intensity.
At the elite level, a half-percent or one-percent gain in performance is enormous. These are people with professional dieticians, trainers, and recovery specialists monitoring everything from sleep to electrolyte balance. They noticed.
Josh's broader point is that top athletes approach their bodies the way good CEOs approach their companies — with a long-term, systems-level mindset, obsessively focused on prevention and optimization rather than crisis intervention. Their discipline in the gym is a reflection of how they think about performance in every domain.
The Afternoon Energy Experiment
For people who aren't dealing with a specific health condition and want a simple way to notice what hydrogen water does, Josh offers a concrete experiment.
Most people experience an energy dip in the mid-to-late afternoon and reach for coffee or an energy drink. The next time that happens, drink hydrogen water instead.
You won't feel the caffeine rush. What you'll feel instead is something closer to your best hour of the day — clear, sustained, without the spike-and-crash cycle. Hydrogen can reach the brain in as little as five minutes, and unlike caffeine, it doesn't have an eight-hour half-life that interrupts your sleep later that night.
Better sleep leads to better brain function. Better brain function leads to better decisions and more patience. Josh frames this in terms of performance: if you're making a major decision at 5 PM in a depleted state, research on judicial decision-making shows that even judges give harsher sentences right before lunch than right after. You don't want to be making important decisions when your system is running low.
Who's Buying It — and What Surprises Josh
Echo Water's customer base breaks into two main groups: people over 45 who've received difficult health news and are actively looking for solutions, and a younger cohort who prioritize wellness even on a tight budget.
It's the younger group that surprises him most. The Echo Flask retails at $300 — a price point that's easy to dismiss as a luxury item. But Josh regularly sees college students and young professionals choosing to invest in it over discretionary spending on travel or entertainment.
"When I see that sacrifice made by that younger generation," he says, "it's really impressive."
The host's two daughters are among that younger generation. They bought the product on their own, described a material difference in how they felt, and brought a vocabulary around gut health that their father — a wealth management professional who spent years treating his body like a machine that just needed more fuel — is still catching up with.
The Beneficial Cycle
Perhaps the most compelling thing about Josh's personal story isn't the dramatic symptom relief — it's what came after.
Once his inflammation came down enough that he could move without significant pain, he became interested in eating better. Eating better gave him more energy. More energy led to exercise. Exercise improved his sleep. Better sleep cleared his thinking. Weight came off. He got back upstairs in his house.
None of those things happened in isolation. Each one enabled the next. That's the cycle he describes — not a single product solving a single problem, but a foundation shift that allows the body to start doing what it's designed to do.
"It's a very subtle thing that builds over time," he says, "and then you notice when you stop."
One high-performance athlete, traveling for a competition, forgot their Echo Flask and called to have one overnight-shipped to their hotel. They'd assumed they'd be fine without it for a few days. They weren't.
Where the Conversation Is Going
The host draws a parallel to cold plunge therapy — something that seemed fringe and strange just a few years ago and is now widely accepted, practiced by athletes, executives, and everyday people alike. Hydrogen water is at an earlier stage of that same curve.
The host, for his part, has been noticing a consistent pattern: every time his inflammation goes down, his A1C numbers stabilize or improve. He can't attribute it to hydrogen water alone — he's also eating cleaner, doing intermittent fasting, making other changes. But hydrogen water is one consistent element in a system that's working.
That's ultimately the argument: not that hydrogen water is a cure, not that it replaces everything else, but that it's a foundational input the body was designed to have, that most people are deficient in, and that when restored, makes everything else work better.
The centennial population — people living past 100 — is now the fastest-growing demographic. The question isn't just whether you'll live that long. It's what the quality of those decades looks like. That's the conversation hydrogen water belongs in.
How to Get It
Website: echowater.com — recommended as the safest way to ensure you're getting an authentic product
Amazon: Available, but be cautious — knockoff bottles exist on the platform and can produce chlorine and other harmful byproducts rather than pure hydrogen
Availability: Currently shipping across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK, with the Middle East and Asian markets opening soon
For the full library of hydrogen research: hydrogenstudies.com
