What happens if you swallow gum?

[hi-v-rocknroll]

A 32-year-old male presents to the hospital with a stomach ache ...

...

... and nothing else happens. - ChubbyEmu

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKOvOaJv4GK-oDqx-sj7VVg

[gamache]

Nothing, really. It's food-grade plastic and it will come out the other end.

Now, what happens if you seal high-pressure hydraulic oil systems with it? Let's find out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RYVSmuOmc

[giantg2]

What if it's chicle, does it differ?

[metadat]

Why is the pressure gauge full of liquid? (Presumably water? but why / how?)

Quite the talker there :)

Edit: Got it Shog9, thanks!

[jrh3]

My child went through a phase of swallowing a bunch of gum. He got appendicitis. It might have been a coincidence. The article does not mention appendicitis but some of the symptoms are the same as intestinal blockage.

[Doxin]

Once during a LAN party (back when those were a thing) I chewed gum for 24 hours straight. Near the end of the 24 hours it quite suddenly turned to dust in my mouth. It's anecdotal of course but I'd be highly surprised if enough gum made it through the stommach intact to cause issues farther down the line if it can't even survive the mouth for any appreciable length of time.

[mkmk]

I'm not sure why, but this makes me think of the time before ubiquitous internet, when the answers to questions like this one were much harder to come by.

[furyofantares]

What I did when I was a kid was swallow every gumball in a carton of gumballs to prove that they couldn't possibly be staying in my stomach for 7 years because nothing else would be getting through.

[dylan604]

Before the internet, everyone knew that if you swallowed a watermelon seed that it would grow in your belly. Ipsofacto, if you swallow gum, a gum tree would grow. It is known

[lanstin]

I have had a low grade curiosity about this since the 1970s, so nice to have it definitively answered (tho I'm a bit sad gum is just plastic now). Next up: coke and Mentos, and swallowing sunflower seeds (although really this article answered that one implicitly).

[gmfawcett]

Yes, although the New York Public Library has had you covered since the 1960's: https://qz.com/732086/the-new-york-public-librarys-little-kn...

[ljlolel]

Ditto

[daneel_w]

As a kid in the 80s and early 90s I swallowed flavored chewing gum of all kinds all the time. They were one of many beloved candies, and I (literally) ate hundreds, if not a thousand.

[smusamashah]

Try eating a chocolate while chewing bubble gum. The gum will soon dissolve / break into tiny threads/pieces. It might be rough experience and you may feel like spitting it out.

Happened to me by accident as a kid and I remember asking some cousins to do the same and they experienced the same thing. Unless gums are made differently, it should still work.

[m463]

Mixing peanut butter and gum.

As a matter of fact, it is a perfect solution for getting out gum stuck in your hair.

It just dissolves.

Another unexpected solvent I found was when I was a teenager working on a gasoline engine. Don't pour gasoline in a styrofoam cup. The gas went right through the cup, like it wasn't even there. Ate a hole anywhere it touched.

[serf]

you can sorta-kinda do that with anything with a high fat content.

the fat interacts with the gum base and emulsifiers. the fat also coats the components in a way that reduces likelihood of re-amalgamation.

[Modified3019]

Haha, yeah I did that exactly once. Turned into a horrible goo.

[giantg2]

With the new gums being synthetic plastic and waxes, I wonder what effects there might be from things like microplastics.

[batch12]

Market it as a microplastic cleansing product...

[kazinator]

What's amazing is how, if you chew a piece of gum long enough, it suddenly breaks down. All of it, at the same time, into bitter-tasting, mealy soup of gum particles.

[euroderf]

Confirmed. In my teens I'd leave my gun on the bedpost for multiple nights. And yes, at some point after days of chewing it does suddenly disintegrate into a sea of bits maybe max one millimeter long.

[whycome]

You ever shake cream to make butter? It happens suddenly in q similar but reversed way

[floppiplopp]

Well, Timmy, the gum goes on a magical journey of adventure and discovery, earning its MBA to become a middle manager in the marketing department.

[carabiner]

Some day I hope they will research how it feels to chew 5 gum.

[n3xus_]

Ever since that xylitol study came out, I've stopped chewing gum

[Modified3019]

And what study are you referring to?

[krmboya]

Sad to learn that gum used to come from tree resin, but is now made from synthetic material.

Are we really aware on the long term what changes like this do to the human body?

[mikeyinternews]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbg0ZBXnuZE

[out-of-ideas]

lmao - any particular story on how you first came across this song?

[pc2slow4webpack]

1/d * 1wk seems like a low threshold for problems

[JohnMakin]

It's always been amazing to me that in the post-internet, pre-enshittification era of the Information age that people could go around confidently spouting bullshit facts like "gum stays in your body for 7 years" when a few swipes of a thumb can tell anyone with an internet connection otherwise.

Nowadays this doesn't hold as true, because search results / LLM's tend to give you the information it thinks that you want rather than what is actually the result. Have seen a lot of people getting into dumb, easily disprovable arguments and using a copy pasted google summary as evidence to whatever absurd claim they are making.

[lanstin]

Given the prompt "Why does swallowing gum result in the gum staying in your body for 7 years?" Claude explains that that story is a myth, so maybe search is dead but GenAI isn't totally useless. Wikipedia also comments on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum#Choking_and_excret...

[hi-v-rocknroll]

There are vast hundreds of millions to billions of people who don't watch the news and don't read books, get their information from social media and rumors, and don't know about authoritative primary sources or critical thinking.

After all, what else would explain populist authoritarians being so wildly popular almost globally at this time?

And maybe we need a social media platform that forbids plaintext and only allows fixed patterns of statements backed by citations from reputable sources only? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[jiveturkey]

um why don't they answer the real question: what happens if you swallow bubble gum?! 12-year old me needs to know.

[glonq]

Raise your hand if you read the topic wrong the first time.

[tzs]

No, but if you want to something about what happens when you swallow what you probably think it might have been misread as, the Straight Dope has some information on that [1].

[1] https://www.straightdope.com/21341232/how-many-calories-are-...

[7bit]

I read "a gun" and was wondering if it's really that many people that would warrant writing an article about it.