Top Reasons You Should Never Drink From Plastic Straws

Celebrities have been known to launch all kinds of trends contouring, meticulous pantry organizing and Oreo-stacking, and that’s just a few of the Kardashians’ antics  but they’re not experts in these fields, by any means, so it’s worth giving any recommendation a healthy dose of skepticism before trying it yourself.

They’re Killing Whales.

About 500 million disposable straws are used each day, according to Ecocycle.org. That’s enough to fill 127 school buses each day, and almost all of them are headed to landfills, since plastic straws aren’t accepted for recycling. Many of these straws wind up in the ocean, where they break down into small particles that whales and other marine life mistake for food.

The more we talked to people about the pros and cons of drinking through straws, we found other reasons why many people are changing the way they sip.

They’re Not Protecting Your Pearly Whites.

If you’re all, “Free Willy isn’t my problem, and I don’t care about wrinkles, because I just dropped $300 on teeth whitening, and I need to keep my Chiclets fresh,” first: Are you a character from a Ryan Murphy show? Second: That straw may not be preventing your teeth from getting stained after all.

If you’ve tasted the drink, the teeth have been exposed. The only way to protect your teeth using the straw method would be to place the tip of the straw at the back of the mouth behind the teeth and tongue so the liquid goes straight from cup to back of the throat without touching the teeth.”

They’re Giving You Smoker’s Lips.

Even if you don’t smoke, that daily iced coffee habit can give you the same look over time. When drinking out of a straw, the movement of the mouth area that you have to make will encourage the breakdown of collagen and elasticity more quickly, causing unnecessary wrinkles and lines.

They Make You F***.

There, we said it. The F word. But it’s true: Drinking through a straw can cause gas, which can turn you into Toots McGee for the rest of the day. Not so sexy. At this point, it’s still unclear how drinking through a straw will impact your dog’s chakras, but these four reasons make a compelling case to pass on the plastic.