The NYT doesn't seem to concerned about ingesting plastic in this article, "Is It Bad to Chew Gum All Day? Here’s what to consider before you pop in that second (or third or fourth) piece."
I'd say yes, it's bad. Obviously. But what do I know. There are some gums without plastic. See "I Tried 6 Non-Toxic Gum Brands With Safe, Plastic-Free Ingredients" (The Green Choice).
I tried one of them one time. It was terrible. And expensive.
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43 comments:
If the gum doesn't kill you there's always dog doo doo climate change lurking "new study suggests".
I limit chewing to iingestibles.
People still chew gum? Why?
If you are afraid of plastics and other stuff in your food (hint-there is lots of it)—why are you chewing GUM?
I only chew gum right before bedtime. I pop in a stick of sugarless gum in to clean my teeth before I go to sleep.
About the NYT, since RFK Jr. is pushing healthier food products, the NYT (and most of the Democrat leadership) will no longer be concerned about the safety of our food. In fact, they'll tout the benefits of artifical ingredents.
The Gum lobby is not happy.
Give me Fruit Stripe gum, which may have the fastest time of all chewable treats between putting it in your mouth and it losing all flavor. Amazing treat technology that basically forced you as a small child to eat the entire pack in about three minutes to have any enjoyment of it at all. What a great marketing angle - a treat so ephemeral that you have to eat it all, and then likely buy more, if you liked it at all. I loved the commercials as a child - here is one in glorious black&white, which might emphasize the point I'm making about this colorful gum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2_7Dluou2c
A few years ago some PGA golfers were chewing gum for purported mental benefits (https://golf.com/news/phil-mickelsons-secret-weapon-chewing-gum/). For a while many were visible chomping away but I did not see any of this during the Masters. Golfers will try anything that promises to lower their score and it is well known that in golf "Any change works for three holes".
If tin whistles are made of tin,
What do they make fog horns out of?
"oh my God, he's using italics..."
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor
on the bedpost overnight?
If your mother says don't chew it,
Do you swallow it in spite?
Can you catch it on your tonsils,
Can you heave it left & right?
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor
on the bedpost overnight?
I loved Fruit Stripe.
Chewing gum is banned in Singapore.
Grok says:
Chewing gum is not fully banned in Singapore, but its sale, import, and public use are heavily restricted. Since 1992, Singapore has prohibited the commercial sale and import of chewing gum, except for therapeutic or dental purposes (e.g., nicotine gum or sugar-free gum for oral health), which requires approval. The restriction stems from concerns about public cleanliness, as gum litter was causing maintenance issues, like sticking to public spaces and MRT systems. Possession and private use of chewing gum are not illegal, but bringing it into the country for distribution or spitting it out in public can lead to fines up to SGD 1,000 for littering or SGD 100,000 and jail time for illegal import/sale. Enforcement is strict, and public awareness campaigns reinforce compliance. Some exceptions exist, like small personal amounts for travelers, but these are scrutinized. Posts on X reflect mixed sentiments, with some praising Singapore’s cleanliness and others criticizing the restriction as excessive.
Deadly microplastics! Next on MSM, “ it’s better to chew tobacco than to chew gum! And it supports undocumented migrants who are here to pick our tobacco!”
My favorite gum was the flat, stale, brittle gum that came with Topps baseball cars.
Jupiter asks why do people still chew gum. A questions without and answer. I stopped before I was teen, and the only gum I used on a regular basis was Bazooka. Still available, though not for a penny at the corner store. Yes, I'm that old...
What are the advantages of chewing gum? For someone my age, maybe none. Well, less then none- I have two bridges- one installed yesterday, and gum or anything else sticky might possible pull them off.
For youngsters- as in old enough to be chewing and to understand they shouldn't swallow it, endless chewing might offer several benefits. For example, lets take orthodonture. The advent of the internet enables anyone to find all kinds of arcane knowledge. Like, for example, more "primitive" societies have no need for orthodonture. Their mouths are plenty big enough to accommodate all 32 teeth. Your head doesn't stop growing at birth. In more "primitive" societies, jawbones get a lot more exercise. Tough breads that require chewing, instead of soft Wonder Bread that builds bodies in 12 ways! Yeah, I'm old enough to remember those commercials. But, being soft and easy to chew apparently not jaws. Hmmm... Maybe there's a relationship there. There have been, to my knowledge, no certified double blind studies to show that modern children's diets leads to smaller mouths and subsequent need for braces and orthodontic work and removal or molars, but, seems the evidence points that way. And encouraging gum chewing to enable the stress needed for jaw growth might be a good thing. A good stiff gum, like Bazooka, but maybe with Xylitol which retards the bacteria that cause tooth decay rather then sugar that feeds those bacteria. Along with that beef jerky, pretzels, various dried fruits, and other tough to chew snacks that would exercise the jaw more. Were I to raise my children today- their snacks would be far more varied and tougher. 1 of my 5 looks at all the same stuff I do- and my grandchildren there are being fed differently then the ones from my other 4.
During WWI and WWII there were interservice boxing matches. And Americans might sometimes lose, but were rarely knocked out. Officers from the other countries agreed that was due to American penchant for gum chewing that strengthened our jaws. Does gum chewing strengthen jaws? The jury is out on that. IMHO, a definite yes if done when younger and still growing. A definite maybe later on. Simple search "does gum chewing strengthen jaws" and you'll find controversy over that. And that Amazon sells jaw strengthening gum.. That may or may not actually do that...
Rubber wasn't elastic enough for Mr. Wrigley?
People chew gum to avoid chewing tobacco.
"Many gums are made using plastics like polyethylene... This helps give gum its elasticity..."
Well, you should see Polyethene Pam
She's so good-looking but she looks like a man
Well, you should see her in drag dressed in her polyethene bag
Yes, you should see Polyethene Pam
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Get a dose of her in jackboots and kilt
She's killer-diller when she's dressed to the hilt
She's the kind of a girl that makes the "News of the World"
Yes, you could say she was attractively built
Yeah, yeah, yeah
They word it as if the plastics are providing the flavor.
Is the polymer in the room with you right now?
Isn't it time for sensible gum control?
We should let people poison themselves.
We should force the people selling the poison to make it clear what they are selling.
I don't have gum very often, although, like others, I was partial to flavor-vanishing Fruit Stripe in my youth. Never really thought it to be full of plastic now. Gives me pause.
When I quite smoking 24 years ago I did it cold turkey with one exception. I chewed gum from the time I got up till I went to bed. I think it was Wrigley's Spearmint. Did that for close to a year then quit. Man did I develop some jaw muscles!
I used to chew gum in my youth, but my jaw started to hurt
"...the only gum I used on a regular basis was Bazooka."
The topic is chewing gum containing plastic and the supposed health detriments such products represent. Bazooka is bubble gum, the form of such confections containing the most plastic per piece.
The curious thing about bubble gum, other than the bubble-blowing, is the premiums. Chewing gum is just sold by itself and the packaging, which is considerable -- the outer wrapper, the individual sleeves, the metallic inner wrappers (I think that's a bygone thing nowadays) The whole presentation is engagingly complex. Bubble gum, however, seems to require a premium -- some added value to make the product appealing. In the case of Topps bubble gum, the premium was the product, the enclosed slab of bubble gum was a practical joke. I doubt any other chewing gum product has been more culturally significant than the Topps 1962 trading card series, Mars Attacks.
Bazooka had a far better confection, so their premium was a stupid little four-panel color comic strip starring Bazooka Joe, a war-era vacant lot stickball urchin who wore a black eyepatch pirate-style. He looked like a kid, but maybe he was a disabled combat veteran. Many of them looked like kids, too. I understand these are collectable now. Bazooka Joe got his name from a WWII L-4A pilot named Charles Carpenter. The L-4 was a light artillery spotting plane that was largely identical to the Piper Cub civilian sports aircraft. These came from the factory completely unarmed, which didn't suit Lt. Carpenter's aggressive nature. So he six M1A1 anti-tank rocket launcher on his "Grasshopper", three on each wing strut, and began shooting back a the Germans who shot at him. His exploits earned him the nickname, "Bazooka Charlie". Not wanting to be too obvious, the confectioners called their titular mascot "Bazooka Joe".
Erratum: So he six M1A1 anti-tank rocket launcher on his "Grasshopper", three on each wing strut, and began shooting back a the Germans who shot at him.
It should read: So he installed six M1A1 anti-tank rocket launchers on his "Grasshopper", three on each wing strut, and began shooting back a the Germans who shot at him.
But do you know where the word 'Bazooka' came from? It was originally a musical instrument of sorts, created and named by a comedian named Bob Burns, out of stove pipe and a whiskey funnel, with a crude slide of sorts. It was played kind of like a trombone, to comic effect.
In the early days of testing for the new shaped-charge anti-tank weapon, one of the soldiers took one look at it and said 'That damn thing looks just like a Bob Burns Bazooka' - and the name stuck.
The white fillings I'm putting in people's mouths are all plastic. They are leaching micro plastics 24/7 365. Nobody says a word about them because it would be an admission that the amalgam fillings I used to place weren't so bad after all. The consequences of good intentions.
tcrosse said...
“Isn't it time for sensible gum control?”
We can start by banning high capacity gum magazines. No one needs a 35 piece pack.
But do you know where the word 'Bazooka' came from?
But do you know why Charles Carpenter used the M1A1 bazooka and not the improved M9 version?
The M1A1 version used a dry-cell battery to ignite the projectile's solid rocket motor. The weapon's trigger was a merely a switch that closed the circuit between the battery and the high-resistance igniter inside the projectile. Adapting that system to be fired from the L-4's instrument panel was mostly some additional wiring. Unfortunately the M1A1, was not acceptably reliable. The battery was excessively vulnerable to moisture and cold. The M9 replaced the battery with a magneto that generated current from the hand strength of the soldier. Adaptaing that mechanism to remote operation from inside a Grasshopper spotter plane wasn't straight-forward.
I think we should have a new measurement for gum flavor. Call it the Minute of Flavor (MOF). It would be a measure of the typical time to loss of flavor. For example, a 1 MOF means you should be able to chew a pack of gum and the flavor to loss time for each of the sticks should group to within 1 minute of each other.
Terrible and expensive are actually two key ingredients in many natural, saving-the-planet products. It used to be all of them, but now it's just many of them. So they're getting better.
At my parochial grade school, if you were caught chewing gum in class, after the obligatory question "I hope you brought enough for everyone?", the offender had to to ball it up and stick it on the tip of their nose for some indeterminate time.
With apologies to Martin Niemöller, I didn't speak out for the gum chewers because I was not a gum chewer.
Everything we touch and ingest has those wonderful little pieces of plastic in them. Hell, I wear a mouthguard to bed at night to keep the sexy women at bay. (If you're reading this, honey, I mean you). It's nothing but plastic. It's supposed to keep me from grinding. But the thought of my teeth grinding away on it releasing micro bits of my dentist's finest work...keeps me grinding.
Dick Clark's Saturday evening show from the Little Theater just off Times Square was sponsored by BeedhNut Spearmint gum, which was said to be Flavorific. Each teenager in the audience was issued a big green IFIC button. Dick Clark Beech-Nut Show
The non-PC explanation of Singapore's gum rules is that otherwise old-school Chinese uncles would just spit it out in public
I would have thought that our host would feel about adults chewing gum the way she feels about men in shorts. Apparently I am not a good mindreader.
I hate gum, and I hate that people chew it. The black spots that mark many sidewalks and entrances are from people spitting out gum, which then melts in the sun, and leaves a permanent mark. Terrible.
I chew gum on planes during ascend and descend. The pressure build up in the ear canal can be agonizing otherwise.
My favorite gum was the flat, stale, brittle gum that came with Topps baseball cars.
I remember that stuff. Like cardboard with fake pink sugar sprayed on it.
Bubble Yum was my favorite growing up. Haven't chewed gum since high school.
"... terrible. And expensive." Like oh so many ideas that originate on the left.
Lordy this made me think of Black Jack gum. Licorice flavored - so they said. I LIKE licorice, but hated Black Jack.
Now, how many of you oldies can still do the Teaberry Shuffle?
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