To be loosing my mind over DC using bottled microplastic-y water for years

[ByeByeBabyBabyTooth]

Would really appreciate some perspective as I’m struggling massively. DH is anti-tap water - regular boil notices in our area - so our house has been drinking solely from 5 gallon drums + a water cooler for years. A friend mentioned microplastics in bottled water to me yesterday - I hadn’t made any link with our water until then - and now I’ve fallen down a horrible google rabbithole. According to one university study, my small kids have injested up to a trillion particles over this time, most of which will never leave their blood. I know that there is no conclusive evidence around plastics and cancer / health risks but it looks like just a matter of time.

Have moved to tap water and generally low plastic anyway but really feeling like we’ve massively fucked up here and set the kids up for lots of health issues etc. and that it’s totally unrecoverable. And yes I know there are microplastics everywhere but bottled water seems to be far and away the worst offender and they’ve been drinking litres every day for years.

I’ve removed voting for this as think that lots of votes confirming that this is a problem will trip me over the edge totally. Would just really appreciate some support and a handhold I guess as I just feel so so awful! Thanks very much

This. None of us can avoid the microplastics and chemicals in the environment like BPA, BPS etc, they are everywhere. Including clothes. It’s just how it is now. But it does sound like your tap water is best avoided so I’d probably stick with what you were doing.

You could give your DC 100% mountain spring water and feed them nothing but organic goat droppings from your grass fed mountain herd and they'd just go off to uni and eat pot noodle, haribo and blue raspberryade for three years.

When I moved to a very old property with possible lead pipes the advice was not to worry about it. The insides of the pipes will be lined with so much limescale that lead poisoning wasn’t a possibility.

Worrying about microplastics is like worrying about UV rays from the sun. There’s no escaping them. You can do things to reduce the amount of exposure like not using plastic containers or utensils that are scratched, but you’ll never be able to eliminate ingestion.

Millions of people die each year due to lack of clean water. We are very lucky to live in a part of the world where clean water is readily available, where we can quench our thirst and bathe without having to worry about contracting cholera. Please stop googling and try to put this into perspective.

The additives and chemicals, sugar and salt in the food you eat in the US will kill you before bottled water does.

They've found microplastics in the placentas of unborn babies. Microplastics are in food. I really think that ship has sailed.

This sounds like health anxiety. Microplastics aren't great (obviously) but this level of worry about it is concerning. And if you think about it on a logical level, there are many more things that pose more of a threat to your children as they grow up.

Sadly op I think that’s just the world we live in now . Every so often things flare up about what Wi-Fi does to us or mobile phones frying our brains etc. The world is just highly polluted by all sorts of junk and each of us affected by something or other. Just all get on and live your best lives. You can always find something more to worry about: life is full of it.

@Carrotsandgrapes maybe that’s what this is, health anxiety. Whatever it is its horrible.

I know that there are microplastics everywhere but the odds are that my kids have way way more in their systems than the average. And it’s not like the bus analogy as, in this case, we made their food decisions for them.

There’s nothing you can do about it except change to a filter. If you’re obsessively worrying about what harm it may or may not have caused, take a look at some CBT worrying techniques, like having a set worry time (I will only worry about this for ten mins each day and do structured worry journalling in this time). The problem with worrying and researching all the time is it makes you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re actually just feeding it/ making it worse. It’s especially hard when what you’re worrying about involves uncertainty (what if this has possibly hurt them/ will hurt them in the future) but you have to find a way to manage it/ calm it down. I speak as someone who freaked out about lead piping in the water supply for their new house, so I do understand!

@RiceR1ceBaby Oh, thank you for that - I have never heard of structured worry journaling so checking it out now.

And in practical terms give them glass bottled water I think tap water is going to make you worry too.

the odds are that my kids have way way more in their systems than the average.

I doubt it. Most kids regularly drink from reusable plastic cups and bottles. Even if they drink tap water, the water is often mixed with squash which comes from a plastic bottle. Most babies have plastic or silicone dummies. They eat from plastic spoons.

The other thing I would say op is I think heated plastic is a far bigger issue than cold liquid in a plastic bottle.

I try not to worry about cold food or drink in plastic ( I mean it practically all is
if you buy any amount from a supermarket.) However I don’t really use ready meals fullstop and would never heat them in the plastic container they come in. Ditto why I don’t like microwaves. So if you don’t do much of that, your Dc are no worse off. Plenty of Dc grew up with mum binging a plastic container into the microwave to warm up their dinner.

@Calliopespa that’s another good consideration, thank you.

It also highlights that it’s probably flawed comparing an absolute (but huge!) number of particles in bottled water to an unknown number of particles in other things e.g. microwaved meals, milk in plastic containers, even toothbrushes and toothpaste etc which also might be a huge number but just haven’t been measured yet

Exactly. And it’s why you can’t drive yourself crazy over it.

Your Dc have been exposed because they live in a modern world. But roll back to pre-plastics and there’s a much higher chance they’d have died in infancy or from some childhood disease we now vaccinate against.
To live is to face risk and to love is to fear. I get that a world that seemed perfectly ok when you were just responsible for yourself suddenly seems completely inadequate when you bring something as precious as your baby into it. Welcome to motherhood: the joy and the angst.

Why can't you just use one of those filtered pitchers and drink tap water?

I refuse to buy water in plastic bottles, and very few plastic-packaged products at all. For example, I use laundry sheets that come in a cardboard sleeve instead of big jugs of laundry detergent, etc. Where there's a will there's a way.

My DC has a water bottle that's metal on the inside for school most schools shouldn't mind. I wasn't even thinking of the micro plastics but if a plastic bottle is in the sun it starts to taste weird and ik most classrooms the water bottles get left near the window. I think a metal one is a good investment it's lasted years whereas whenever we had plastic bottles before they'd break every other month

Well there are microplastics in fish now aren't there so it's pretty impossible to avoid.

Those kinds of water filters don’t filter out pathogens, which is why I presume OP has to boil water. And the pitcher and filter are also made of plastic so it’s not much different to drinking from a plastic bottle.

I've worked on the fringes nanoplastics/microplastics research for around 15 years. Tap water contains both, but bottled water contains far more.

Without going into too much detail, these are the steps I've chosen to take for my family:

No longer microwave in anything other than glass

Never use non-stick anything (slightly different concern to mp/np)

Drinking water and cooking water that is absorbed in any quantity (soaking beans or noodles for example) is filtered using a filter that tackles the contaminants that concern me the most (it's a US one) - in the UK, Epic Water filters are good.

I try to dry clothes outside whenever possible

It is true that we are surrounded by microplastics, and they're in our food - even homegrown, organic stuff. My view is that we are not going to avoid them altogether, but trying to minimise the number that we consume directly (along with other contaminants) is a reasonable goal.

OP, why do you have boil notices? What's in your water that's causing concern where you are?

https://medium.com/@Rdy2Trvl/copper-cup-benefits-15-reasons-to-safely-drink-copper-473927b51f40

just boil water or use a copper cup

Thanks @Bradderson for your input - we also do everything on your list, by chance more than anything. Don’t have a microwave as DH is wary of them.

Given your expertise, how worried would you be about drinking bottled water only for a couple of years? Is it orders of magnitude worse than other day to day potential sources of plastics? Or is it just easier to study?. Thanks!

@Bradderson the recent ones are for high/unsafe levels of trihalomethanes, elevated manganese and high levels of ecoli (copied from the news releases, am not a science person!) We’re not on constant boil notices, just every six months or so for a few weeks - the problem is the notification is very slow so the tap water is bad for a while before we know. Day to day, it has a strong smell like a swimming pool.