Researchers say chewing rubber releases microplastics in the mouth

The chewing rubber releases hundreds of small plastic pieces directly in the mouth of people, according to the results of the researchers.

The researchers, Tuesday 25 March 2025, also warned the pollution created by the rubber -based cake.

The small study comes when the researchers have increasingly discovered small plastic fragments called microplastic all over the world, from the tops of the mountains to the bottom of the ocean – and even in the air we breathe.

They also discovered microplastics full of human bodies – included within our lungs, blood and brains – unleashing fears on the potential effect that this could have on health.

“I don’t want to alarm people,” the main researcher behind the new study, Sanjay Mohanty, told AFP.

There is no evidence that directly shows that microplastics are harmful to human health, said Mohanty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The new pilot study instead tried to illustrate yet another little studied way in which these mostly invisible plastic pieces enter our bodies: chewing rubber.

A doctoral student at the UCLA, Lisa Lowe, chewed seven pieces each of 10 rubber brands. So the researchers performed a chemical analysis on his saliva.

They discovered that a gram of rubber (0.04 ounces) has released an average of 100 microplastic fragments, although some pour more than 600. The average weight of a rubber stick is about 1.5 grams.

People who chew about 180 pieces of rubber per year could ingest around 30,000 microplastics, the researchers said.

This pales compared to the many other ways in which humans ingest microplastics, Mohanty underlined.

For example, other researchers estimated last year that one liter (34 fluid ounces) of water in a plastic bottle contained an average of 240,000 microplastics.

The most common chewing gum sold in supermarkets is called synthetic rubber, which contains oil -based polymers to obtain that rubbery effect, the researchers said.

However, the packaging does not listen to any plastic in the ingredients, simply using the words “rubber -based”.

“Nobody will tell you your ingredients,” Mohanty said.

The researchers tested five synthetic rubber brands and five natural rubber, which use vegetable -based polymers such as the sap of trees.

“It was surprising that we discovered that the microplastics were abundant in both,” said Lowe.

The rubber is almost all microplastics during the first eight minutes of chewing, he added.

Lowe also warned plastic pollution of chewing rubber, especially when people “spit it on the sidewalk”.

The study, which was presented to a peer-review magazine but not yet published, was presented in a meeting of the American Chemical Society of San Diego.

The largest cheap tire manufacturer to the world, Wrigley, did not respond to the request for the comment of the FP.

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