He’s an actual gumshoe.
A physician is setting the record straight once and for all about an “old wives’ tale” that claims that for those who swallow a bit of gum, it stays stuck in your stomach for seven years.
“I’ve no idea where the parable got here from — I can only imagine that it was suggested because someone desired to stop their children from chewing gum,” Simon Travis, a professor of clinical gastroenterology on the University of Oxford in the UK, told CNN.
He said that swallowing gum isn’t dangerous, but when someone swallowed three or more pieces of gum in a day, it’s considered excessive and will potentially cause a digestive blockage.
“If you happen to swallow chewing gum, it’ll undergo the stomach, and undergo into the intestine, and pass out unchanged at the opposite end,” Travis said.
“There are cases of chewing gum lodging within the intestines of infants and even children in the event that they’ve swallowed quite a bit, after which it causes an obstruction,” he continued. “But in over 30 years of specialist gastro practice, I’ve never seen a case.”
Travis isn’t the just one to chew out the parable for good.
Dr. Aaron Carroll, chief health officer at Indiana University, also debunked the gum myth — in addition to several others.
Speaking with IU Day, he’s squashed the five-second rule myth that food doesn’t pick up the germs on the ground if it’s snatched in time. Nonetheless, he said the ground is unquestionably cleaner than the refrigerator handle or the sponge.
He also set his sights on explaining that sitting too near the TV won’t wreck your eyes.
The regular myth buster is co-author of the book “Don’t Swallow Your Gum!: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health.”
Carroll explained that swallowing gum won’t harm someone, but that it won’t make them healthier either.
“It has no dietary value,” he told CNN.
“Gum is made out of gum-based sweeteners, flavoring and smells. Gum base is a mix of elastomers, resins, fats, emulsifiers and waxes. So I wouldn’t say it’s healthy.”
While swallowing gum isn’t harmful unless it’s done “excessively” one 5-year-old boy from Ohio swallowed 40 pieces of gum and needed a procedure to have a clump of it stuck in his stomach.
He went to the ER a day after swallowing the gum and suffered cramps and diarrhea consequently of his obstructed GI tract.
Blowing one piece of bubble gum may also be dangerous — if it’s spicy CaJohns Trouble Bubble Bubble Gum, that’s.
A minimum of 10 elementary students at Dexter Park School in Orange, Massachusetts, were hospitalized in April after encountering the gum, based on officials.
