Chewing gum releases hundreds of microplastic particles into the mouth
Although research into the dangers of microplastics has only just begun, microplastics have been found in all parts of the human body, including
Chewing gum can shed microplastics into saliva, pilot study finds - American Chemical Society
https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2025/march/chewing-gum-can-shed-microplastics-into-saliva-pilot-study-finds.html
Chewing Gum Releases Hundreds of Microplastics In Your Mouth, Study Finds : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/chewing-gum-releases-hundreds-of-microplastics-in-your-mouth-study-finds
In a study presented at the American Chemical Society's spring meeting, ACS Spring 2025, Sanjay Mohanty, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and his colleagues had subjects consume five commercially available synthetic gums and five natural gums.
Chewing gum is made up of gum base, sweeteners, flavorings, etc. Synthetic gum uses a synthetic gum base made from petroleum-derived polymers, while natural gum uses a gum base made from plant-derived polymers such as chicle .
To prevent human factors such as gum chewing technique and saliva secretion from affecting the results, Mohanty and his research group had one subject chew seven pieces of each brand of gum. The subject was Lisa Rowe, a doctoral student at UCLA.
The study involved participants chewing gum for four minutes, taking saliva samples every 30 seconds and rinsing their mouths with water after each chew. In a separate experiment, saliva samples were taken periodically over a 20-minute period to measure the rate at which each gum released microplastics.
The research group initially hypothesized that because synthetic gum base is a type of plastic, it would be synthetic gum that contains the most microplastics.
However, analysis of the collected samples revealed that synthetic and natural gums released similar amounts of microplastic particles into the mouth, with an average of 100 particles per gram of gum, and some brands of gum releasing as many as 600 particles per gram.
Since a single piece of gum weighs 2-6g, eating one large piece of gum could release more than 3,000 microplastic particles into the mouth. According to the research group's calculations, a person who eats about 180 pieces of gum per year could be ingesting a total of about 30,000 microplastic particles.
However, Monti stresses that this is only a small fraction of the amount of microplastics humans are ingesting: Previous studies, for example, have found that one litre of bottled water contains an average of 240,000 microplastic particles.
Bottled water found to contain hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic particles, some of which come from water purification filters - GIGAZINE
'Our goal is not to scare anyone,' Mohanty said. 'We don't know yet whether microplastics are dangerous to humans, and no human studies have been done on them. But we do know there's a lot of plastic in our daily lives, so we wanted to find out what the impact is.'
Experiments have shown that most of the microplastics fall off within two minutes of putting gum in your mouth, and 94% of the microplastic particles are released after eight minutes. Therefore, if you want to minimize the amount of microplastics you ingest from gum, Rowe suggests that you should chew one piece of gum for as long as possible, rather than popping new pieces of gum into your mouth one after another.
In this study, due to limitations in the performance of the equipment used, only microplastics with a size of 20 μm (0.02 mm) or more could be measured. Smaller microplastics may be released into saliva, and further research is needed to confirm the possibility of nano-sized plastics being released from gum.
'The plastic released into saliva is only a small portion of the plastic contained in gum. If gum is not properly disposed of after chewing, it will become a new source of plastic pollution in the environment, so please refrain from spitting gum outside or sticking it on walls,' said Monti.
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