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.
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.