CLAIM:
A viral video suggests drinking from plastic bottles leads to ingesting a credit card's worth of plastic weekly.
FACT:
False. While an earlier 2019 study did claim so, more recent research from 2022 shows that the actual microplastic intake is about one millionth of that amount, and comes from various sources, not just plastic bottles. This means humans would take 23,000 years to ingest a credit card's worth of plastic, not one week.
First Check came across a viral reel from the account Mel Robbins, a popular host and author with a massive following of 77 lakh on Instagram, where she is seen speaking to a physician about the dangers of drinking water from plastic bottles.
In the reel, which appears to be a snippet from a longer podcast, she is speaking to Dr William Li, a physician and author who speaks of ingesting microplastics which come from drinking water in a plastic bottle.
"Now we realize that the bottled water, the plastic bottles are shedding microplastics into the water. So, while we don't taste it, we actually pouring plastic into our bodies. Little tiny particles, tiny particles, And you know how much plastic we are ingesting on average, every week? A credit card's worth of plastic," he claims in the video, which has an alarmist caption "I couldn’t believe this shocking truth about plastic water bottles 🤯."
The Instagram reel has got 72 lakh 61 thousand views with 1 lakh 62 thousand likes, and is also present on Facebook. The same reel has also been posted on Instagram from @themelrobbinspodcast, and has garnered about 3 lakh 50 thousand views and 9,000 views.
This appears to be cut from a larger podcast with the physician, which is titled, "EAT THIS to lose fat, prevent disease and feel better and is available on Spotify. Dr Li has 3 lakh 38 thousand followers on Instagram and is an advocate of curing diseases through diet. The title of his first book is "Eat to beat disease."
Upon researching this claim, First Check found the original source of this claim. A World Wide Fund - for Nature (WWF) publication titled "No Plastic in Nature: Assessing plastic Ingestion from Nature to people" cited another study by the University of Newcastle, Australia, to make the assertion.
"A new study by the University of Newcastle, Australia suggests that an average person could be ingesting approximately 5 grams of plastic every week. The equivalent of a credit card’s worth of microplastics," the June 2019 publication said.
Upon further research, we found a more recent study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters on the topic, dated November 2022, which however, pointed out that the earlier calculations had "severe errors."
