I don’t drink. I don’t drink alcohol. So what to fill the glass with? It’s generally a binary question. A no-choice choice: fizzy or flat. Here, in the opulent West, having a drink has always implicitly meant alcohol, with social, sexual, commercial and chic associations. If you go soft, then that just means you’re thirsty. I was once at an official function in Islamabad where the waiters came round offering red or white. They meant Coke or Sprite. But now people in the secular, morally relative, ethically confused, vaguely guilty West are drinking less. Actually, we’re drinking more; just less alcohol. No - as you were. Alcohol has become a social marker. Smart, liberal, caring, educated, high-end folk drink less alcohol, but much more liquid. Pram-faced chavs suck alcopops, Baileys and each other’s vomity faces. Really concerned, organic, free-range, Sky Plus people, who used to have a blush-making two houses and three cars but now boast five bins, a bike and a gross of jute-and-hessian shopping bags, are never, ever separated from the renal drip of a plastic water bottle, in the belief that models and people who want to live in Notting Hill Gate are, in fact, not like the rest of us, but a higher form of amphibian in constant need of hydration. If they don’t drink a litre an hour, they will shrivel into cockney market traders.

Water consumption is an alternative medical orthodoxy: every glossy health page and beauty supplement tells us to drink at least our own body weight in water a day. This contemporary truism sprang from a misunderstanding of a piece of ancient research that measured the amount of liquid a healthy body needed in a day. Nutritionists, only just clever enough to be nutritionists, thought this meant pure water. It didn’t; it meant liquid. Which we get from all sorts of things, including everything we eat and everyone we snog.

But there’s been a backsplash: water’s had a bad press recently. There’s not enough of it here, and there’s too much of it there. Bottled water is me-me-me friendly but you-you-you unfriendly. And now we’re all supposed to drink from the tap, which doesn’t cost anything. So how do we know it’s worth it? And anyway, it tastes as if it’s been strained through a chemist’s pocket. So the next big thing is Improved Water. Water with added zest. Life, energy, beauty, goodness, orgasms, intelligence, integrity, celebrity, stardust and immortality. Vitamin water is the big thing. I know this, because a dozen PRs have told me, and because Coca-Cola have just bought Vitamin Water for £2.1 billion. And they’re the people who knew that Tab Clear was going to be the next big thing. And remember bubble perms? They were the next big thing. Legwarmers have been the next big thing at least three times. Gordon Brown was the next big thing.

So, taking the opportunity to vandalise a passing bandwagon, I’ve done a taste test of millions of these drinks at home, with the Blonde, and Ali and Flora, my teenage children, whom I expect are likely to be, armed with my money, the target market for these things. Vitamin Water comes with a graphically medicinal label: it looks like reused cough mixture. V Water can’t make up its mind whether it’s orientally chic, Californianly fit or chemically magic. Sip is just girlie (“Sip: Sip Your Way to Gorgeous Glowing Skin”) and Firefly Water looks like Scandinavian antifreeze. Each comes in multiple flavours: fruit, and mixtures of fruit, and cocktails of fruit.

We started in a vaguely organised way, but, swiftly, the magic water sapped all sense, taste, endeavour and the will to swallow. They merge into one. They all have a faintly pastel flavour, ghostly trace tastes; spectral reminders of something that might once have lived in the bottle. They are Proustian glugs, with a reminiscence of ancient wine gums and ascorbic acid, the memory of tinned fruit salad. Mostly, as Ali neatly put it, they taste like bubble gum just before you spit it out. But the flavours are not the point. This is Botoxed water; this is water that’s been to a health farm; water with a headband and a high-cut leotard. I suspect they’re purposely not nice enough to seem indulgent; they’re infantile and monosyllabic flavours; the point of the stuff is the style of life they imply when you’re seen carrying one.

The mission statements on the bottles are long and cloying and make you think of roomfuls of smug young men in bright shirts with character glasses, being frightfully clever to each other. This is from Multi-V Vitamin Water: “Today, it’s simply not enough to do one thing. Trainers double up as roller skates, and printers also fax, copy, and scan. Actually our friend Gloria swears that she even found one with its own page on Facebook.” How embarrassed would you be if you had to go home and say that’s what you wrote at work today? Well, there’s another paragraph of this cringe-inducing bollocks.

Perhaps it’s there to draw your attention away from the more empirical information, which points out that there are 23g of sugar in the bottle, which is more than a quarter of your entire daily requirement. This is two-thirds of the sugar in a can of Coke. And Coca-Cola is an infinitely more sophisticated, moreish drink. Sip says: “We all know water works wonders on our skin.” Well, most of us do. Some teenagers don’t. We use it for washing, generally. V Water lets me know that we know how busy life can be, which is why we’ve combined hydrating spring water with vitamins, minerals, blah blah blah blah. In case you missed it, “hydrating water” is a dank, dribbling spigot of a tautology.

All these drinks allude to medicinal properties: how can we improve on pure water? Well, by involving antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, happy thoughts, Buddhist chants, the ground-up bones of saints, sunlight and the love of a good woman. To argue with these coy promises of longevity and health would be to admit that they had an argument. They don’t. There is nothing in this stuff that will take you on for a single day longer than your allotted span. They won’t cure anything, stop you catching anything, make you a better shag, unless you use the empties as a butt plug.

Grudgingly, we all agreed that if we really, really had to choose the best one, that is, if we were all crawling through the Sahara with tongues like carpet tiles and were confronted by the full range, then it would have to be Firefly. Based on green tea, maté and rooibos, it is vaguely, slightly, better than the rest. Less chemical, less sweet. But we still wouldn’t want to drink a whole one. “What bothers me,” said Flora, “is, why do all these plastic bottles want to be my best friend?”

FOODS OF THE FUTURE?

SKIN-BOOSTING YOGHURT Danone Essensis yoghurt drink promises to improve skin condition if taken every day for six weeks. It contains omega-6-rich borage oil, vitamin E and extracts from antioxidant-rich green tea. Already available in some parts of Europe, it is expected here soon - in three flavour combos including raspberry-pomegranate.

ANTIWRINKLE MARSHMALLOWS Each grapefruit-flavoured Hello Beauty Collagen Marshmallow from Japan is packed with 3,000mg of complexion-enhancing collagen. The manufacturer suggests that eating 50g of its product a day can have a similar effect to collagen injections, but these haven’t really taken off in the UK. If you’re feeling intrepid, buy online: £2.30 for 100g from mountfuji.co.uk.

ANTIOXIDANT SWEETS Borba Skin Balance Confections Gummi Bears Booster, designed by the American cosmeceuticals guru Scott Vincent Borba, are a fun take on skincare supplements. Six nutriceutical gummi bears daily - each packed with vitamins, and antioxidant extracts from green tea, grape seed and çcaÍ berries - will nourish your skin from within. Currently available in Sephora stores in America you can buy them online from drugstore.com; £13 for 136 gummi bears.

SEX-ENHANCING CHOCOLATE The Newtree Sexy dark chocolate with ginger 73% cocoa bar, from Belgium, is infused with invigorating ginger and guarana extracts. When combined with the stimulating effects of the chocolate’s natural caffeine and theobromine content, it claims to have a mild aphrodisiac effect. £1.99 for 80g, from Waitrose.

IMMUNE-SYSTEM-IMPROVING LOLLIPOPS LicketySip is a beauty-boosting ice lolly enhanced with protective vitamin C, selenium and skin-soothing rose-petal extract. It comes in three fruit flavours. £1.20 each from Harvey Nichols and Eat, or online from sipdrink.com.

ANTIAGEING COFFEE Nescafé Protect was launched in the Philippines in 2005. This instant coffee has been manufactured specially to preserve the antioxidants that occur naturally in green coffee beans. Nescafé claims one cup contains three times more antioxidants than green tea. Whether this product will go global remains to be seen.

JUST PLAIN WEIRD Chewy sweets from Kanebo Foods claim to fragrance your sweat two hours after you’ve chewed them. Available in citrus, vanilla or rose, they also contain vitamin C and hyaluronic acid to help prevent premature ageing. £1.99 from mountfuji.co.uk. Also available in Japan is Otoko Kaoru, a rose-menthol fragrance gum for men.

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