Chewing a single piece of gum releases hundreds or thousands of microplastics into the saliva, with the average gum-chewer at risk of ingesting 30,000 microplastics in a year, according to a new pilot study.
Researchers of the study “wanted to identify how many microplastics a person could potentially ingest from chewing natural and synthetic gums,” the American Chemical Society said in a March 25 statement. While natural products use plant-based polymers to achieve a chewy texture, other gums “use synthetic rubber bases from petroleum-based polymers.”
The study tested five brands of synthetic gum and five natural gums. A person was tasked with chewing the gum for four minutes in one experiment, and 20 minutes in another, with saliva samples periodically collected to assess microplastic content. Pilot studies are typically small-scale tests done to refine variables involved in the research before a larger full-scale investigation….