Here’s why not to chew gum

Teachers and parents are always telling kids not to chew gum—and now there’s a good health reason to support their protests.

Each stick of chewing gum can release hundreds to thousands of microplastics into saliva and which could be swallowed, new research has discovered.

People swallow tens of thousands of microplastics every year through foods, drinks, plastic packaging, coatings, and production or manufacturing processes.

Now we can add chewing gum to the mix, say scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).  The researchers tested five brands of synthetic gum and five of natural gum, which can be bought in shops.  They got one volunteer to chew each piece of gum for four minutes, and the researchers measured the number of microplastics in saliva samples.

They measured an average of around a hundred microplastics released per gram of gum, though some individual gum pieces released as many as 600 microplastics per gram. A typical piece of gum weighs between 2 and 6 grams, meaning a large piece of gum could release up to 3,000 plastic particles. If the average person chews 160 to 180 small sticks of gum per year, the researchers estimate that gum-chewers could be ingesting around 30,000 microplastics annually.

The synthetic and natural gums had similar amounts of microplastics, and they also contained the same polymers: polyolefins, polyethylene terephthalates, polyacrylamides and polystyrenes. The most abundant polymers for both types of gum were polyolefins, a group of plastics that includes polyethylene and polypropylene.

Despite these scary findings, the researchers aren’t sure what this means for human health.  “Our goal is not to alarm anybody,” says Sanjay Mohanty, one of the researchers. “Scientists don’t know if microplastics are unsafe to us or not. There are no human trials.”

Nonethless, caution might be the byword, so stop chewing gum—just as your teacher told you to.

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