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Does chewing gum contain microplastics?

Yes, according to a new study conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The researchers who conducted the scientific study at UCLA presented the results at the American Chemical Society conference earlier this year. They demonstrated in the research how chewing gum has a high potential to release microplastics, which are rapidly absorbed into human saliva.

The discovery is in addition to many other objects or foods that contain microplastics, such as water bottles. In this sense, they discovered that chewing gum, both synthetic and natural brands, contained an average of 100 plastic fragments per gram; but some could even release more than 600. A study that was concluded after asking a doctoral student at the University to chew seven pieces of gum from 10 different brands, five of them synthetic and five natural. She chewed each gum for four minutes and a saliva sample was taken every 30 seconds.

In the last round of the investigation, the student rinsed her mouth with water to combine it into a single sample. In a second experiment, saliva samples were collected over a 20-minute cycle. The team then counted the plastic particles under a microscope or by infrared spectroscopy.

“Our goal is not to alarm anyone,” Sanjay Mohanty, principal investigator of the project and professor of engineering at UCLA, shared in a statement. “Scientists don’t know whether microplastics are dangerous to us or not. There are no human trials. But we know that we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and that’s what we wanted to examine here.”