How's this for inventing a new drink: first, you discover an odd gas produced as a by-product of brewing beer. Next you pop some mice inside a bell jar containing the gas and observe that they all die. In a fit of inspiration you add the gas to some water and notice that it fizzes. Discovering that this sinister gas is, in fact, carbon dioxide - the very substance we make effortlessly when we breathe - you then try and persuade the world to drink the stuff. It sounds crazy but both Joseph Priestley and Jacob Schweppe thought it perfectly reasonable when they introduced 18th-century society to the joys of fizzy water.

But now, in the modern scheme of mad health worries, carbonated water ranks high. Fizzy water, say the worriers, weakens your bones and strips the lining of your stomach. But can the tiny amount of CO2 in a bottle of mineral water really harm us?

Happily, research has been conducted. Spanish women given carbonated water were found to have perfectly normal bones after two months of treatment. A group in Omaha were given carbonated drinks and their urine samples showed that carbonation led to no increase in the amount of the calcium they lost. So not only has carbonated water been shown to have no effect on weakening bones, there seems almost no conceivable means by which it could.

There have even been studies looking at the effect of carbonated drinks on the stomach and gut. Among the many that showed there was no harm done was an American study on competitive cyclists. Even when exercising like lunatics and producing maximum amounts of CO2, consuming a little more of the gas via fizzy water made no difference to the bikers. And all of this is without even resorting to animal studies, such as the one from Poultry Science showing that fizzy drinks helped cockerels cope better with heat stress.

Unsurprisingly, given the hefty turnover of carbon dioxide our bodies deal with effortlessly each day, there remains no serious reason to think that carbonation makes water dangerous. Swapping a glass of plain old tap water for the bottled variety adds nothing save a little bit of sparkle.