Chewing gum releases microplastics. Should you stop?

Microplastics flow from gum as you chew it, the preliminary results of a new study suggest.

The flavor of flavor in the first minutes of chewing a stick of gum comes from hundreds to thousands of microplastics that the gum publishes in your saliva, said that the main author of the study, Sanjay Mohanty.

Indeed, the basic ingredient of chewing gum – the part that makes it soft – is a synthetic rubber. It’s plastic.

“This is something that very few consumers know,” said professor of engineering at the University of California.

“You eat a plastic material. At least 2% of this is plastic,” he said, referring to a piece of gum.

Admittedly, microplastics are everywhere. Countless products lose them in your home. They are in your dust, your food and your drinking water. They are in the ground and the oceans around the world – from the Mariana trench at the top of Mont Everest. They were found in human blood, poop, hearts, testiclesplacentas and breast milk.

A particularly spent study recently revealed that human brains potentially contained enough microplastics to make a spoon.

MiERCHANTY said: “99% of the things I see around me are plastic, so I shouldn’t be surprised to find plastic in everything, including my own body.”

Research has revealed correlations between microplastics and inflammation, infertility, lung and colon cancers and the risk of heart attacks and stroke. However, it is not clear if microplastics have caused or contributed to these conditions.

“My goal is just to inform what we could do differently,” said Mohanty.

Chewing less gum, it seems, is something we can do.

Moisséy presented these results, which did not suffer from the peers through a scientific journal, during the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society last week.

“The chewing of the eraser was not something on my radar,” Bi Brita Baechler, director of research on ocean plastics on the non-profit organism Ocean Conservancy, told Bi Brita Baechler, which recently co-wrote a study on microplastics in food.

“I think scientists become really creative while trying to get a more complete image of our exposure to microplastics,” she added.

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Natural Gum released into plastic too

Moisséy and the students graduated from his laboratory chose five brands of synthetic gum and gave seven pieces from each brand to one person, who chewed each room up to 20 minutes, rinsing with clean water between the rooms to eliminate the residual plastic.

Knowing the plastic base of the gum, Moisséy was not surprised when he measured hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic polymers swimming in the person’s saliva while they were chewing each room.

It was surprised, however, when they carried out the same tests with five brands of natural gums, which are made from plant materials like Chicle instead of a rubber base.

The natural gums resulted in the same amount of microplastics in the chewer saliva.

They even found the same plastic polymers in the two types of gum: polyolefins, terephtlates in polyethylene, polyacrylamide and polystyrene. These types of plastics are also used in food wraps, provisions, car parts, egg boxes and packaging peanuts.

Due to the measurement techniques they have used, this experience has only been able to detect plastic particles 20 micrometers wide or more. It is about a fifth the width of a human hair. It is likely that the eraser also releases even smaller plastic – nanoplastics – Mohanty said.

Should you chew gum?

There are good news – in a way.

The researchers found the most microplastics in the first two minutes of chewing gum. After eight minutes, 94% of the plastic particles they detected had already been released.

A simple way to reduce plastic is to chew your eraser longer instead of bursting a new piece, said Lisa Lowe, a graduate student who led this study with Mohanty, in a press release.

In the large scheme of your daily microplastic ingestion, a stick of gum is probably not much. You ingest billions of microplastics of more than one tea cup based on a tea bag containing plastic (which is more common than you think), revealed a 2019 study.

However, a habit of wick of gum could add up. Based on their results, the researchers calculated that someone who chews 160 to 180 small gum sticks per year would ingest around 30,000 microplastic particles per year.

MiERCHANTY said his wife had stopped chewing gum after hearing their results.

“Why eat chewing gum and ingest plastics directly? Is the gum mastant is not essential,” said Mohanty.

If you chew, added Mochanty, throw your eraser in the trash instead of leaving plastic chewed in the street.