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There are many urban legends, myths, wives’ tales, whatever you want to call them, that get passed down through the years.
Some of them actually turn out to be true. Many of them, unlike the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and Taylor Swift traveling inside a suitcase, are not real.
One such urban legend is that if you swallow your gum, be it accidentally or on purpose, is that it will just sit there inside your stomach for somewhere around seven years before it gets digested.
Kids love that one because it freaks out their friends.
But is it true?
Not according to Simon Travis, professor of clinical gastroenterology at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“It’s an old wives’ tale,” Travis told CNN this week. “I’ve no idea where the myth came from — I can only imagine that it was suggested because someone wanted to stop their children from chewing gum.”
Now that doesn’t mean you can now just go around swallowing your gum willy nilly. Swallowing three or more pieces of gum per day would be considered excessive, according to Travis.
The Mayo Clinic agrees, adding, “On very rare occasions, large amounts of swallowed gum combined with constipation have blocked intestines in children. It’s for this reason that frequent swallowing of chewing gum should be discouraged, especially in children.”
“If you swallow chewing gum, it’ll go through the stomach, and go through into the intestine, and pass out unchanged at the other end,” Travis said. “There are cases of chewing gum lodging in the intestines of infants and even children if they’ve swallowed a lot, and then it causes an obstruction. But in over 30 years of specialist gastro practice, I’ve never seen a case.”
Dr. Aaron Carroll, professor of pediatrics and chief health officer at Indiana University, explained, “Gum is made out of gum-based sweeteners, flavoring and scents. Gum base is a mixture of elastomers, resins, fats, emulsifiers and waxes. So I wouldn’t say it’s healthy.”
Carroll added, “You theoretically could get something big enough in a small child to cause a blockage, but this is not something that regular people need to worry about.”
The only people that really need to worry about it are people with Crohn’s disease or those with some types of cancer and surgeries that can narrow the GI tract.
Swallowing one piece of gum, however, even for those people almost never causes a problem, according to academic gastroenterologist Dr. Leila Kia, an associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.