Chewing gum releases thousands of microplastics into your mouth

Microplastics seems to be everywhere; it’s in our oceans and our seafood, it’s in our drinking water and breast milk, it’s flowing around in the air around us and falling with rain, and it’s even inside our bodies and brain tissue. Disturbingly, scientists keep finding microplastics in new places. And now they’ve found it in our chewing gum, as well.

Researchers have found that hundreds to thousands of microplastics can be released into our saliva and then ingested when we’re chewing on just a single stick of gum.

And no, it doesn’t seem to make any difference if you’re chewing on one of those cheap synthetic gums or on a naturally sourced gum. “Surprisingly, both synthetic and natural gums had similar amounts of microplastics released when we chewed them,” said Lisa Lowe, who presented the research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Diego, USA.

“10 natural and synthetic gums were chewed by a human subject for a specific period (2 min to 20 min), and the saliva results during chewing were collected and analyzed for microplastics using an FTIR microscope and smartphone-enabled method to quantify microplastics. The results reveal that each gram of gum can release up to 637 microplastic particles, with 94% being released within the first 8 minutes of chewing. […] Most of the released microplastics were small, with a median size of 45.4 µm, though smaller particles might have been missed due to the limitations of detection methods like FTIR. Four main plastic polymers were detected in the saliva, with polyolefins being the most common.”

“Our goal is not to alarm anybody,” said Sanjay Mohanty, the project’s principal investigator and an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “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.”

The authors of the study notes that the direct ingestion of microplastics could be a potential health risk. And while there might not yet be a definitive scientific consensus on the health risk of microplastics, other studies have linked microplastics to serious health problems for us humans. For example, studies have shown that microplastics cause damage to human cells. Other studies have revealed how people who have microplastics lodged in a key blood vessel were more likely to experience heart attack, stroke or even death.

Clearly, microplastics are not good for our health. But it’s scary to think that while we’re still trying to figure out what kind of danger microplastics actually pose to our health, the amount of microplastics in our brains is rapidly rising.