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?)
The research completely disagrees:
Ingestion of microplastics during chewing gum consumption
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.
There’s nothing quite like when someone reads a study and doesn’t understand it, yet is such a smug, condescending arsehole whilst being completely wrong.
Edit: JFC, you didn’t even get past the abstract.
No? If no plastic is in the chewing gum base, then it’s not from the chewing gum base.
You didn’t even get past the title, apparently. If the methodology changes everything, do share. (I mean it that this was helpful, though)
You could say the background amount that just got in as a contaminant is too much, which is a stance you can take, but isn’t what we’re talking about.
From the last sentence in the abstract:
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:
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.
Yeah, 637 chunks under 50 um, assuming that’s a particle count, isn’t very much at all.
Unfortunately, that’s not true of pretty much anything. Mineral dust, microplastics, insect parts, dead fecal coliforms… Earth is a chaotic place; unless you work in semiconductors, nothing is truly clean (and if you do, you know it’s still mostly an aspiration). For food handling purposes, the requirement is that the amount of contamination is far, far smaller than you’ll ever notice, and everything harmful is dead.
Like, in chemistry, I’m pretty sure you never get a 100% pure reagent, right?
Somewhere else in this thread, I bring up plastic utensils. You know how stuff wears down after a lot of use? Yeah, that’s because every contact with something basically knocks off a layer of material. Usually we act like that material just vanishes, but of course it doesn’t. A good chunk of all microplastic out there is actually tire rubber from roadways.
Of course, factories use plastics as well, and the places where the raw ingredients come from have exposure to plastics, and it’s all transported along those road networks.
We made a material that ~never biologically breaks down. That makes it great for long-lasting packaging, infrastructure and tools, but it’s also going to be circulating around the environment forever. As a chemist, you know it’s kind of been a big deal and helped a lot of things. Hopefully it’s too too bad for us, because going back would hurt, and it wouldn’t clean up what’s already out there.