The EU is everything that can go wrong with bloated, inclusive bureaucracy.  Their proposed constitution had bits of bizarre legal fluff like 'children have a right to be heard', they don't want a strong currency because it damages their individual, heavily subsidized economies if they have to pay more to stay competitive and they make being anti-science into an art form.

A short while ago they sent the public into a panic by declaring X-ray scanners couldn't be used because they might cause cancer - hey, I don't want to be X-rayed either but if the EU really cares about preventing cancer related to travel, they should simply limit the number of times any European can fly per year.  Being 35,000 feet in the air is a lot more dangerous than 3 seconds in an X-ray machine.

Now, after three years (yes, that is years) of debate they have issued an edict stating that no water sold in the EU can claim to protect against dehydration. In other words, water will not keep you from dehydrating, which is the one thing we know water can do.  Meanwhile, homeopathy products, which are nothing but supposedly magic water foisted off on gullible people that can't actually do anything other than hydrate the people who buy it, remains a multi-billion dollar industry over there.

These weren't goofy politicians, this was a panel of 21 scientists of the European Food Safety Authority’s panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies that determined water doesn't work.  What was European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso supposed to do?  Not sign it and be called anti-science?  He signed it, even if he likely thought it was a joke. Now, if you claim water works for dehydration you can go to jail for two years.

Their reasoning?  Reduced water content in the body is a symptom of dehydration rather than a risk factor that drinking water could control.

Poor water.  Now it is culturally orphaned like the EU's 1995 law that banned curved bananas and ugly carrots. If you are trapped in the desert and dehydrating, please be advised that, if you drink water, these EU committee scientists will ridicule you and call you a Flat Earth Holocaust Denier.  If I am ever in a European hospital for dehydration, I still hope my nurse is anti-science and gives me some H2O.

I don't want to be too hard on these guys, they do some positive things; they issued another edict declaring that a strain of GMO corn, scientifically optimized to not need chemical pesticide, is not bad - for the environment, anyway.  It's still not legally cultivated, though, because the EU public makes U.S. progressives look absolutely enlightened in their anti-science kneejerk reflexivity.