Visitors at this past weekend’s Car Free Day Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, had the chance to buy one of the most unusual health food products ever created – unfiltered hot dog water.

Gluten-free, keto-compatible, rich in sodium and electrolytes, and bottled in a sleek glass bottle, unfiltered hot dog water has all the making of a health food craze. And with a hefty cost of $38 per bottle, it even has the price tag to match. Like similar “raw” or “smart” waters available on the market these days, hot dog water comes with a series of supposed health benefits: it’s rich in sodium, which helps your body increase its water intake, helps the drinker lose weight, increase brain function, look younger and increase vitality, and triggers anti-inflammatory processes, making it the perfect post-workout drink. And the cherry on the cake – every bottle contains an actual hot-dog.

Photo: sassy77/Instagram

With products like asparagus water being so popular these days, I would not have been at all surprised if unfiltered hot dog water was an actual think. However, it is not. The hilarious health food creation is the brain child of Douglas Evans, an artist who called it “a commentary on product marketing, and especially sort of health-quackery product marketing”.

“Hot Dog Water, in its absurdity, hopes to encourage critical thinking related to product marketing and the significant role it can play in our purchasing choices,” Evans told Global News. “I think people will actually go away and reconsider some of these other $80 bottles of water that will come out that are ‘raw’ or ‘smart waters,’ or anything that doesn’t have any substantial scientific backing but just a lot of pretty impressive marketing.”

To make unfiltered hot dog water seem like an actual product, Douglas Evans spent real money creating it (about $1,200), and it turned out so believable that people at the Car Free Day Festival in Vancouver, where the artist had his own booth, actually bought about 60 liters of it, at $38 per 500ml bottle. I guess that proved Evans’ point.

So, no, you won’t be seeing, bottles of hot dog water at your local health food store, but with so many other real products that are just as shady, you’re not going to miss it. May I recommend unfiltered, untreated water?