Digesting Gum
Does Gum
Really Take 7 Years to Digest?
Maybe you
couldn't find a nearby trashcan, or perhaps you were enjoying the taste just a
little too much. Whatever the case, you did what most of us have done at one
point or another: You swallowed your
chewing gum. It's only then that a refrain from childhood echoes through
your mind: "Don't swallow chewing
gum—it will stay in your system for seven years!"
Thankfully
the legend is false. As
gastroenterologist Dr. Rodger Liddle of the Duke University School of Medicine
explained to Scientific American: "Nothing
would reside that long unless it was so large it couldn't get out of the
stomach or it was trapped in the intestine."
Chewing gum
consists of a gum base, sweetener, flavoring,
preservatives and softeners. Sugars and flavoring ingredients such as mint
oils break down easily and are soon excreted. Likewise, softeners such as
vegetable oil or glycerine don’t present a problem for the digestive system.
The ingredient that can withstand both
the acid in the stomach and the digestive enzymes in the intestines is the gum base.
But even
though the gum base cannot be broken down, that doesn’t mean it stays in your gut for seven years. Nor does it wind itself around your heart, as some
also assert. Provided it’s a small piece, it
does eventually find its way down and out of the digestive tract.
However,
this doesn't mean you should start
swallowing your chewing gum regularly — in several reported cases, doctors
had to remove taffy-like wads of gum from children's bowels. Swallowing a lot
of chewing gum in a relatively short amount of time, it seems, can cause the pieces to accumulate and stuff up
the digestive tract, causing constipation.
Debunked!
Sources:
P.S. - If you have any urban legend or superstition that you are doubtful of, just comment it and I will try to debunk that.
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