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Chewing gum can shed microplastics into saliva, research finds

Are you keeping a mental list of all the sources of microplastics finding their way into your daily life? You may have another culprit to consider: It’s gum, according to a new pilot study that found chewing just one piece can release hundreds to thousands of microplastics into saliva.

The study is currently being peer-reviewed and will be presented at the biannual meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego Tuesday. Once the review is complete, the authors hope the report will be published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters later this year.

“Our goal is not to alarm anybody,” said senior study author Dr. Sanjay Mohanty, associate professor at the Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Scientists don’t know if microplastics are unsafe to us or not. There are no human trials. But we know we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and that’s what we wanted to examine here.”

Microplastics are fragments of polymers that range in size from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometer). Plastics smaller than that are considered nanoplastics, which are measured in billionths of a meter.

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