Last night, I gave our son a small piece of bubblegum. He normally spits it out, but last night he swallowed it. My husband read me the riot act. "Swallowing gum is really bad for you, you know," he said. Now, when I was a kid, I remember other kids saying it takes seven years to digest gum if you swallow it, but that smacks of an old wives' tale to me. What is the truth? TT Derry.
Reply.
It's hard to find anyone who hasn't heard some claim about the hazards of swallowing gum. No, there's nothing to support this rumour; as sticky as chewing gum might appear to be outside the body, once it's sent down the alimentary canal it's no more remarkable in that respect than most anything else we swallow. We come by our desire to chew gum quite naturally. Chewing the resin of trees is an ancient habit, so in that sense, our gum chewing habit has probably always been with us.
Though parental cautions against swallowing something, which was meant to have the flavour chomped from it and then discarded, might account for part of the warning's spread, the greater part can likely be attributed to the nature of the substance itself. Chewing gum is quickly worked into an unchanging mass in the mouth that, unlike foodstuffs, barely gets smaller no matter how hard or how long we chew it. Its resistance to being broken down by the teeth works to support the fanciful notion that it has special properties, which allow it to lurk in the digestive system year after year. Moreover, since we know we're not supposed to swallow gum, imagination kicks in; inventing a "reason" for this prohibition since the obvious one — that it's not food — lacks an appropriate sense of mystery. Just as a thought though, getting children to swallow their gum might not be a bad idea. It might help to keep the pavements a bit cleaner!
Environmental.
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