You know the old wives tales your parents used to tell you as a kid? Things like, ‘Don’t stick your head out the window or your face will get stuck that way’ and ‘If you swallow a watermelon seed a tree will grow in your belly’.
Turns out, one of them is actually true: you really shouldn’t swallow gum. But it’s not because it will get stuck in there forever – the real reason it’s not a good idea to swallow your Hubba Bubba has to do with the environment. Yup.
Allow us to explain:
Gum won’t lodge in your stomach if you swallow it, but it will lodge in your poop. While this is good news for your intestines (yay! No seven years of gum lodged bowels), it’s not so good for things called ‘fatbergs’: a very large mass of solid waste in a sewerage system, consisting especially of congealed fat and personal hygiene products that have been flushed down toilets. Lovely.
Fatbergs wreak havoc for the environment as they contain a lot of harmful bacteria (not to mention microplastics) which completely disrupt ecosystems and threaten life. Fatbergs also create issues for local sewerage, clogging pipes and creating a world of issues (clogging = no bueno). Not to mention flushing your gum-poop could potentially cause a blockage in your own pipes, which is a huge no.
TL;DR: If you swallow your gum you’re single handedly killing the world. If you spit it out, you’re basically doing the same thing (it’s basically plastic and is impossible to recycle), so don’t do that either.
Instead, the best way to dispose of your gum is to wrap it and trash it. . Sure, it will sit in a landfill forever — with all of our other non-biodegradable crap — but at least it has a home there and won’t kill any innocent animals.
Images: Getty/Delmaine Donson.
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