A frog doesn't grow in your belly, but some people think it will take seven years for your body to break it down
Who hasn't swallowed chewing gum in their lifetime? At this time, many people hear about sticky intestines and chewing gum remains that never decompose, and they are horrified to imagine that when archaeologists find her remains in 600 years, they will only put her on display in the museum as a woman with chewing gum, where the never-decomposing crap will be shown separately, which the archaeological find may have swallowed in the past as a result of some strange perversion.
You can't digest chewing gum
It won't work in a day, nor in seven years. The good news, however, is that our body is so brilliantly designed that it doesn't even start the whole operation, it simply pushes it out of itself during the next toilet visit. Just like it removes other things that it can't use.
The gastroenterologist hasn't seen a chewer in anyone either yet
For those who are really receptive to the topic, David Milov, a gastroenterologist at the Nemours Children's Clinic in Orlando, confirms that the legend that we become one forever with a piece of menthol gum is not true. “That would mean that I should have seen chewing gum residue in every person who accidentally swallowed a piece of gum in the last seven years. But we didn't encounter this during colonoscopy and capsule endoscopy either. It's a fact that sometimes we see a lump here and there in different parts of the digestive system, but according to the patients, they have been languishing in the body for a week at most," said the doctor. Rodger Liddle, a professor at Duke University's Faculty of Medicine, reported the same thing, according to whom an average chew does not cause problems, but if you swallow a lot at once, it does. If we look at it in terms of coins, it is also true that the smaller ones leave the organization, but the bigger ones can already cause problems.
So, what's really going on?
Sweeteners and other ingredients break down, but the base of the gum does not. Fortunately, however, it also does not contain any substance that would be definitely harmful to humans, since if it did, it could not be put on the market. In addition, they found quite a few historical records that people were chewing on various natural gum-like things centuries ago, although it was not melon-flavored back then. In addition, the structure of chewing gum is such that the digestive system does not really affect it, it does not dissolve anything, it may pass through the digestive system a little slower than normal food, but it does not cause any problems.
You shouldn't swallow the gum from now on, though
Some records are for when chewing caused intestinal obstruction. It usually occurred in children who swallowed not one, but several at once. In two out of three cases, the parents gave the child chewing gum regularly as a reinforcement of good behavior, but they no longer paid attention to spitting it out, so the many chewed chews slowly but surely formed into a stretchy mass in the stomach. And a one-and-a-half-year-old child even dropped a few coins and other things onto the chewing gum, which stuck together and caused a blockage. The good news is that although doctors had to intervene in these cases, the children were not in serious danger. And an adult also swallowed sotties in addition to the chew, together with their shells, which formed a hedgehog-like formation by drilling into the chew.
