The small study comes as researchers have increasingly been discovering small shards of plastic called microplastics throughout the world, from the tops of mountains to the bottom of the ocean -- and even in the air we breathe.
“I don’t want to alarm people,“ Sanjay Mohanty, the lead researcher behind the new study, told AFP.
The new pilot study instead sought to illustrate yet another little-researched way that these mostly invisible plastic pieces enter our bodies -- chewing gum.
They found that a gramme of gum (0.04 ounces) released an average of 100 microplastic fragments, though some shed more than 600. The average weight of a stick of gum is around 1.5 grammes.
This pales in comparison to the many other ways that humans ingest microplastics, Mohanty emphasised.
'Tyres, plastic bags and bottles'
However packaging does not list any plastics in the ingredients, simply using the words “gum-based”.
The researchers tested five brands of synthetic gum and five of natural gum, which use plant-based polymers such as tree sap.
The gum shed almost all of the microplastics during the first eight minutes of chewing, she added.
Jones said he was surprised that the researchers found certain plastics not known to be in gum, suggesting they could have possibly come from another source.
People tend to “freak out a little bit” when told that the building blocks of chewing gum were similar to what is found “in car tyres, plastic bags and bottles”, Jones said.
The study, which has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal but not yet published, was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego.
The world's biggest chewing gum manufacturer, Wrigley, did not respond to AFP's request for comment.
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