And that by chewing it you are ingesting a bunch of microplastics? Please confirm if this is true. I don’t want to believe.

Side question: what alternative means is there for sustained, minty fresh breath that does not involve ingesting microplastics? (Mints don’t work that great imo, the freshness wears off too fast. Gum was my go-to. Now what is left?)

  • CanadaPlusEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    Surprisingly, synthetic chewing gum released a similar (p > 0.8) number of microplastics as natural or plant-based chewing gums.

    So basically, there’s microplastics in it as a contaminent, like in actual food. The base itself conclusively doesn’t generate them.

    Thank you for finding the research that confirms it empirically. I was just going off of material science, before.

    • Nikophos@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      10 minutes ago

      From the last sentence in the abstract:

      The result reveals that chewing gum consumption, irrespective of the type of chewing gums, could result in direct ingestion of microplastics.

      I think it may be the opposite? When synthetic chewing gum release the same amount of micro plastics as natural or plany-based gums, it’s not because they’re both releasing “baseline” micro plastics. It’s that they’re both releasing high levels levels of micro plastics.

      Take this with a grain of salt though, as there’s no easy “baseline” level of micro plastics found in food for us to compare to, and different types of microplastics should theoretically have different biological effects depending on the polymer they originally came from (and there are MANY different types of plastics).

      From the introduction, they quite a different study:

      Daily human intake of microplastics from these food is estimated to be approximately 0.0002–1,531,524 microplastics per day (Heo et al., 2024).

      This was kind of crazy to me. I’d assume the ideal level of micro plastics in my food is zero. So in the context of the amount listed by this particular study (“we found that each gram of chewing gum could release up to 637 microplastics, and 94 % of microplastics were released within the first 8 min of chewing”) … gum is maybe not a major concern? But it depends on the types of microplastics being released - like I said before, not all microplastics are the same in make-up or potential harm (I believe - I’m only a chemist, not a biochemist).

      Fun fact: The higher end of the daily microplastic consumption estimate (about 1.5 million micro plastics daily) comes primarily from water bottles!

      Also note that I can’t speak to the trustworthiness or quality of either of these studies, since I haven’t read their methodologis and literature review on a phone is torture.