Chewing Gum Could Make You Swallow Tiny Plastic Pieces

Original Article: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/chewing-gum-contributes-microplastic-ingestion-2025a10007mu

Why Chewing Gum Might Be a Problem

Chewing gum is popular around the world for freshening breath, helping oral health, and even delivering medicine. But many chewing gums — even “natural” ones — use plant-based or synthetic plastic polymers to make the gum stretchy and keep its flavor. When you chew gum, you could swallow microplastics. Until now, no one had measured exactly how much plastic people might ingest from gum.

What the Study Found

Researchers had a person chew 10 types of gum (five natural and five synthetic) for different times between 2 and 20 minutes. They tested the person’s saliva using a FTIR microscope and a smartphone method. They found that each gram of gum could release up to 637 microplastic particles, with 94% of them released in the first 8 minutes. Surprisingly, natural gums and synthetic gums released about the same amount of microplastics. Most plastic pieces were tiny — about 45.4 micrometers — but even smaller ones might have been missed because of testing limits. Polyolefins were the most common type of plastic found.

What This Means for You

This study shows that chewing gum can cause you to ingest microplastics, which might be a health risk. Scientists still aren’t sure if these tiny plastics are dangerous to people because there haven’t been human studies yet. The researchers say they aren’t trying to scare anyone — just to show that everyday activities like chewing gum expose us to plastics we might not even notice.