American actress Reese Witherspoon (47) is receiving a lot of reaction to a video she shared on TikTok. She makes iced coffee with snow. “Is this bad? Can’t I eat snow?”
Monday January 22, 2024 at 9:05 PM
“Okay, we got a ton of snow in the last few days, so we decided to make a recipe,” she says in a video on TikTok, which has now been viewed more than 4.8 million times.
The video shows her shoveling snow off her car with a coffee mug and then adding chocolate sauce and salted caramel. Then she also adds cold brew coffee. “It is so tasty!”
(Continue reading below the video)
But Witherspoon’s video provokes a lot of reactions. Many followers point out to her that it is not healthy to eat snow. Witherspoon himself saw the many reactions coming in and made a new video. “There are so many people here who say snow is dirty,” she says. “So we took snow from the backyard and put it in the microwave and it’s clear – is this bad? Can’t I eat snow?”
The actress then made two more videos in which she addressed the issue, after which many reassured her: “I’ve been eating snow all my life and I’ve never gotten sick,” she regularly says.
The British broadcaster BBC asked two specialists to discuss whether or not to eat snow. Both agreed: it’s best to think twice. According to Staci Simonich, a professor of environmental and toxic ecology at Oregon State University, snow is safe as long as it doesn’t come from an urban area and it isn’t the first few inches of snow. “The first bit of snow sweeps pollutants from the atmosphere,” she said. It is also best to choose an area where no people or animals have walked.
Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Reading, puts it simply: “Would you drink rain? If not, don’t eat snow,” he said. “The risks are probably small, but why take the risk? I hate to disagree with Reese Witherspoon, but people invented water purification processes for a reason.”