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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Before the internet everything happened in periods of seven years. All the cells in your body would be replaced, your luck would recover from a broken mirror, the bankers would discharge your debt, and missing people would finally be declared dead. It was a much more elegant system than we have today.
When I heard the song about kookaburra and where they sit, I damn near shat.
("Kookaburra sits in the old gumtree, eating all the gum nut he can see...")
:- O
I was confusing kookaburra with chupacabra, and I also confused capybara with chupacabra too... and umpires with vampires... being a child was terrifying. LOL
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).
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.
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.
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.
My co-workers once told me their experience about caring for an older epileptic patient. Many patients with epilepsy continue to take the same meds for decades if the meds work for them, which means you’ll encounter some ancient drugs.
This patient was ordered chloral hydrate, which is given in liquid form. One of the younger nurses went to give them med in a styrofoam cup, only be shocked that the cup had melted.
Acetone works great too. It's very useful for getting rid of styrofoam from packing because you can reduce several cubic feet of styrofoam to a brick 1/100th the size and then throw that away instead.
I actually had the opportunity to try the peanut butter to remove gum from hair once, but my child just cut it out before I could get ready. The beginning of the mullet haircut season. (I was SAHD but with the self-cut hair, my wife (at the time) insisted on an immediate emergency hair cut at some fancy salon place, and the mullet was determined to be the only choice available. The gum was stuck about 2 inches above the bangs, so shortening the bangs to that length was a substantial committment). Anyways, I digress.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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)_/¯
About 750 million people are entirely illiterate as well (in any language). I think the actual number may be higher because I’ve worked with a surprising number of them across global oilfields.
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].
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... and nothing else happens. - ChubbyEmu
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKOvOaJv4GK-oDqx-sj7VVg