What is chewing gum made of and what happens if you swallow it? These days, chewing gum is just a gum base with sweeteners and a plasticizer. You can swallow it without any harmful effects.
Humans have used something to chew on for thousands of years. A 5,000-year-old lunch of birch bark tar with toothmarks in it was found in Finland. Birch bark contains phenols, which are an antiseptic, so this gum would have been good for cleaning teeth and curing gum infections.
Different cultures chewed on different things which almost always had antiseptic properties and helped keep the mouth healthy. The Mayans and Aztecs chewed chicle from a gum tree and the Ancient Greeks chewed mastic gum from the mastic tree.
Native Americans chewed the gum from the spruce tree. When the early settlers went to America, some of them picked up the habit. It helped keep their teeth healthy.
In 1848, John B Curtis started to sell this spruce gum as “The State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum”. In the 1850s, a gum made from paraffin wax was invented. This was flavorless and people used to dip it in a plate of sugar every now and again to make it sweet. Paraffin wax is actually harmful and can lead to intestinal blockages if swallowed. Maybe this is where the idea that swallowing gum is harmful for you came from, because, back then, it was.
Flavored chewing gum was invented in the 1860s, which is when the modern form of gum we eat today came about.
In the late 1860s, Thomas Adams Sr. managed to import a lot of chicle gum into America. He intended to use it as an industrial rubber substance, but it turned out to be far more popular as a chewing gum. Along with other salesmen, like William Wrigley, the popularity of chewing gum took off. However, it wasn’t until World War 2, when each soldier was given chewing gum in their ration pack, presumably to help protect their teeth, that the popularity went through the roof. Incidentally, it was the Wrigley company that managed to persuade the American government to do this.
This was good for the chewing gum companies, but not so good for Mexico, which was growing and harvesting most of the chicle. The unsustainable harvesting methods were destroying the trees and the price of chicle was rising. The chewing gum companies started to switch to synthetic rubber materials through the 1970s and 1980s. This did huge damage to the Mexican economy that is still having an effect today.
So, what is modern chewing gum made of? It has a synthetic gum base, flavor, sweeteners, glycerin to keep it moist, a plasticizer to stop it getting brittle, and a polyol coating to make it last longer in the packet. And what does all of that actually mean? The main part of the gum is obviously the gum base. This is what everything else is built upon. Every company is different, but it is usually made out of an organic material called polyisobutylene, which is an organic plastic. It is also used for making lubricants, adhesives, sealants, and cling film. Think about that. The chewing gum you are eating contains the same ingredient that goes into making cling film. The polyisobutylene has to be kept soft and chewable, so it is mixed with wax, which softens it, and resin which gives the chewy feeling. It also has flavors and sweeteners.
Is chewing gum good for you? Well, the ingredients don’t have antiseptic properties like they used to but chewing after a meal can stimulate saliva which is good for your teeth. The gum itself can remove bacteria that form on food stuck in the teeth. Chewing has also been proven to improve working memory and perception speed.
And what happens if you swallow chewing gum? Does it stay in your stomach for 7 years? No. The sugars and flavors will be digested, but the synthetic gum is indigestible. That doesn’t mean it will stay in your stomach though. Your body is pretty good at moving things through and you will pass it pretty quickly. The gum will usually pass right through you in about seven days and is no different to other things we cannot digest, such as fiber.
So, modern chewing gum is made of synthetic gum with sweeteners and flavors and it is perfectly safe to swallow. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.healthline.com/health/how-long-does-gum-take-to-digest#How-gum-is-digested-in-the-body-
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-brief-history-of-chewing-gum-61020195/
https://www.history.com/news/chew-on-this-the-history-of-gum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum