Not to burst your perfectly blown bubble, but it turns out that chewing gum may be flooding your mouth with microplastics.
As detailed in a pilot study, which is awaiting peer review, a team of UCLA researchers found that chomping down on just one stick of the rubbery candy releases up to thousands of microplastic shards into your saliva.
The findings, which will be presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society this week, are yet another example of widespread microplastic pollution, which is so pervasive it's invaded the human brain. The authors, however, urge us not to panic about our chewing gum habit — at least not yet.
"Our goal is not to alarm anybody," lead author Sanjay Mohanty, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA, said in a statement about the work. "Scientists don't know if microplastics are unsafe to us or not. There are no human trials. But we know we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and that's what we wanted to examine here."
We tend to be worried about microplastics seeping into our food. With gum, it literally is our food. Brands produced by manufacturers like Wrigley, you may be horrified to learn, are made from a variety of synthetic rubber substances, including the stuff used in car tires. And yet, despite being a partly petroleum-based product, the candy's potential for spreading microplastics hasn't been widely studied, according to the latest study's authors.
To fill that gap, Mohanty and a colleague analyzed saliva samples from a single subject who chewed on a stick of gum for four minutes each. In all, they tested ten brands: five synthetic gums, and five natural gums.
"Surprisingly, both synthetic and natural gums had similar amounts of microplastics released when we chewed them," coauthor Lisa Lowe, a UCLA researcher, said in the statement.
What did that look like in numbers? On average, chewing a stick of gum, which can weigh between one to six grams, released up to 600 microplastic shards per gram, they found. If someone chewed 180 pieces per year, they could be ingesting around 30,000 microplastics.
That's a notable amount, but Mohanty stressed that it's not all that much compared to other foods. A liter of bottled water, for example, contains an average of 240,000 microplastics.
Should you be worried, then? It's more of an open-ended question than you'd think.
"I don't think you have to stop chewing gum just yet," Oliver Jones, a chemistry professor at Australia RMIT University who wasn't involved in the research, told Agence France-Presse. Most of the microplastics, if swallowed, "would likely pass straight through you with no impact," Jones added.
Because we're only just beginning to piece together the toll of microplastics, the health implications remain unclear. On the other hand, there's a burgeoning corpus of evidence linking microplastics with numerous deleterious effects on the human body — especially once the particles enter the bloodstream — including an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. More recent research found that the particles could induce blood clots in the vessels of the brain.
Erring on the side of caution, one way you could limit your microplastics exposure — without quitting gum entirely — is by chewing on the same piece for longer, the researchers suggested. They found that most of the microplastics were released within the first two minutes, so if you avoid habitually changing out your gum the second it loses its taste, you could be doing yourself a favor. But for the love of all that is holy, please don't spit it out onto the street.
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