Invention Classic: Chewing Gum

Chewing gum is everywhere today, but where does it come from? What did we chew before Bubblicious? How does gum affect us? Robert and Joe explore in this episode of Invention. (Originally published 7/8/2019)

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you a classic
episode of Invention. Will we'll we'll push aside the uh,
the cordoning off of bubble tape, step through the line
and and investigate the world of chewing gum. That's right.
Where does it come from? What did we chew before

(00:28):
we had gum? How does gum, you know, influence our lives?
Those are some of the questions we're gonna explore in
this classic episode of Invention, which originally published July nineteen.
Let's dive right in. Welcome to Invention, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is

(00:51):
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Robert, I've got a
question for you about childhood. Did your elementary school have
draconian anti gum policies? Um, There was definitely and there
were definitely anti gum policies, and I and I agree
with him, And I mean, at the time, I don't
think I was a big gum cheer at the time,
so they didn't really impact me all that much. But

(01:12):
but but ultimately, like I don't like stepping in gum.
I don't like encountering gum stuck to the bottom of
deaths or inside deaths. So I never really had a
problem with it. I think maybe my confused. I mean,
I wasn't a huge gum cheer as a child, but
I do remember thinking about the gum rule. This just
doesn't make sense, it's not fair. It was one of

(01:33):
my first real, uh you know, thought processes of rebelling
against authority and the rules imposed by the man. Because
other rules were like, you know, don't hit people, don't
steal from people, like they all caused harm to someone,
and I was thinking, what harm does it do when
someone choose gum? Now I understand the adult perspective. It's
I think primarily because it's like gross, and because the

(01:56):
gum ends up somewhere. It shouldn't right. The gum ends
up somewhere, it should be Uh. There's also just especially
if it's bubble gum. I don't know. I still I'm
kind of anti bubble gum, Like there's not okay. It
can be fun to blow a bubble, I guess, but
it's just kind of weird. I don't know, And I've
I've taught before, and I don't specifically remember encountering gum chewers.

(02:17):
Maybe I did, but I think if if I didn't
find it annoying, I feel like I would find it annoying,
you know what I'm saying. It's like just looking out
there and there there's somebody chewing, and then it's probably
if if you've ever experienced any level of miss aphonia,
like gum chewing can definitely set off miss aphonia, especially
if it's like gum smacking, you know where it's like
open mouth chewing of the gum. I am less annoyed

(02:39):
by memories of students chewing gum, which I don't really have.
I do remember students in my classes eating just eating
lunch and stuff, which I never knew if I should
make a big deal about that or not. It's just
one of those things that in retrospect I probably should
have forbidden but didn't. On the other hand, I do.
I chew a lot of gum today, Like if I'm

(03:00):
in the car, I will probably even if I don't
really need it, I'll generally grab a piece of sugar
free gum and and chew it a bit. And it's uh.
Sometimes it's not even like a breath freshening exercise. Uh.
Like this morning, I put one in my mouth on
the way into work, and I had looked just brush
my teeth, so there was no like real like freshness

(03:21):
issue at hand. It was just I just wanted the
sensation of chewing the gum. It's a good way of
getting the goat blood off of your teeth. Now that
being said, it is I think it's super handy to
be able to turn the gum if you know you
need a little something to freshen your breath up after
you've just set a meal out and you don't have
access to toothpaste and toothbrush. Um, it can be It

(03:41):
can also be be great while working. It's you know,
while you're studying, writing, etcetera. And then I've also I've
heard of other people like growing to depend on it
in certain tasks. Like here's one I've never quite understood,
but I have heard that some professional wrestlers not only
chew gum while wrestling, but depend on it. Like if

(04:01):
they are not chewing the gum, it like throws off
their their their rhythm or something choking hazard. Right, well,
one would think, right, I mean I as a as
a father, like I definitely if my son were running
around chewing gum, I would probably decide said to give
him the whole, like you're going to choke on that
if you if you run. But uh yeah, there's this
whole thing with with professional refers professional athletes. I mean,

(04:24):
it's obviously big League Chew's named for uh, you know,
for big for Major League Baseball players, who I guess
we're you know, generally chewing tobacco in the old days,
but but still chew gum. You'll still see professional athletes
chewing gum during their events. I think one thing that's
funny but big League chew is that it's the most

(04:45):
unnecessarily macho of candies. And yet if you look back
in history, there is often a very gendered component to
people's judgment of gum chewing behaviors in which gum chewing
is uh is, in many points and societies and history
associated with women and especially young women, and looked on judgmentally.

(05:08):
Uh So, I've got a little ditty from the British
Medical Journal in you want to hear some gum hate? Yeah,
let's hear it. Okay. The question has been raised whether
there is any reason for supposing that the practice of
gum chewing so prevalent in the United States, is on
the increase in this country. We have made some inquiries

(05:29):
and have ascertained that many young women, students, actresses, and
others appear to have acquired this disgusting habit and are
inveterate chewers. We have examined specimens of chewing gum obtained
from various fashionable sweet shops in London and find that,
as a rule, it consists of rubber flavored with aniseed

(05:50):
or peppermint or some o their aromatic substance. Now, I
catch more than a hint of misogyny and all of that,
especially singling out um students and actress actual system. It's
like like women in society, independent, young women that are
that have some level of independence are the ones that
are being singled out as being disgusting gum chewers. And
the gum itself, like you're talking about like peppermint flavored, Uh,

(06:13):
you know, rubber. I mean, what's that? It sounds pleasant?
Doesn't sound that disgusting with this disgusting habit. I've got
a response to this article from the British Medical Journal.
This response is in the North American Practitioner the next
year eight just a couple of selections from it. Our
English contemporaries are taking our people to task as well

(06:34):
they may, for the vile, as they term it, the
American habit of gum chewing. We submit no defense to
the charge and are only consoled by the fact that
the habit is less disgusting than that of tobacco chewing.
Our confreres have our profound sympathy in their efforts to
promote reform. At the same time, we prefer to see
jaw jumpers consigned to the minor bad rather than the

(06:58):
bad irremediable. We regret that this fat is classed as
an American industry. Nevertheless, the fact is too patent for denial,
and there is no accounting for taste jaw jumpers. Never
heard that before, But I think I get what they're saying,
because did you know the kid when you were in
elementary school who didn't just chew gum but did the
like exaggerated a huge up and down movement of the

(07:21):
jaw that I guess I vaguely remember you know saying,
But I was sometimes I would think that that's part
of just having too much gum in your mouth or
deciding to refresh in a you know, like a completely
drained piece of gum with a second piece of gum,
which you know might have seen like a good idea
when you're a kid. One more follow up to the

(07:42):
b m J article. I was reading about this in
a book by Carrie Cgrave called Chewing Gum in America
eighteen fifty nineteen twenty uh. This books from so it
notes that this original British Medical Journal article was reprinted
in the Daily Mail shortly after appearing in the b MJ,
and the printing actually prompted an editorial response that included

(08:02):
an interview with this guy named Hubert Beaumont, who was
managing director of a retail shop called Fuller's which sold
chewing gum, and Beaumont was defensive. He insisted that the
British Medical Journal was wrong that chewing gum was not
made out of rubber, but out of sap that came
from a tree that grow in Mexico. Quote it is

(08:23):
a purely vegetable substance and perfectly harmless. And he also
defended gum chewing from the charge that it was disgusting,
basically saying, hey, people have been chewing stuff for a
long time exactly. So that's what we're gonna look at
for the rest of today's episode, the history and invention
of various forms of chewing gum. Look at the history
of this disgusting habit, the invention of several different versions

(08:47):
of gum across the years, and what are gums says
about us. I do want to say that another time
when I usually have to chew gum or I really
prefer to chew gum, is if I am you know,
flying or driving up into the mountains and the sort
of thing where you're gonna anxiety. Well, I mean we're
encountering pressure changes and uh, you know it's it's great

(09:07):
to can help relieve leave pressure in the in the ears.
You know, I'm doing large part because chewing it and
certainly feel your face the next time you're chewing. I mean,
it is a uh, it involves so many different muscles
of the head and face like it's a it's it's
a it's a major muscular activity. That's a really good
point about the pressure change. I did not go there.
I thought you were going to go to anxiety I

(09:29):
know you're you can get a little anxious on an airplane.
Oh no, well, there are other things. I prefer to
gum for that. But but I don't know that. There
are those who speak maybe we'll get into this a
little later that speak to the anxiety. Um. Uh, the
use of gum to at least mildly treat anxiety. Well,
I mean, I think about the behaviors of some animals
where symptoms of anxiety or anxiety like conditions in some

(09:52):
animals can manifest as chewing behaviors. Oh yeah, well, let's
let's talk about about chewing itself, because alto only, that's
the main activity at play here. So chewing is good,
chewing is necessary, It's okay, No, it's it's great. It's
grateful for the members of the animal kingdom that engage
in chewing, which of course includes us. It allows us

(10:15):
to take the first steps toward digestion. So you're breaking
your food down into smaller pieces and also increasing the
overall surface area of the food, and this will speed
up the effectiveness of digestion. And then chewing also releases flavors,
you know, often very pleasurable flavors. And uh, and this
is all part of the sensory perception of the material

(10:36):
that we're testing out and potentially eating. And that's easy
to forget, like why do we taste things. We taste
things to figure out to know what they are. You know,
this mix of taste and smell that's happening inside your
skull as you mash the lea for the stem or
maybe a bug or a piece of flesh. As you
be chew it up, as you masticate it um, You're

(10:56):
you're sensing it. You're getting a sense of what this
is and and ultimately this is supposed to play into
the decision whether or not to form it into a
bolus with your your tongue in the back of your
throat and send it down to the next step. Very
appetizing to think about while you're actually eating. Yes, I
hope everybody's eating while they or maybe you're at least
chewing gup. But there's also, in addition to just the

(11:19):
pure mashing with the teeth, there's a little bit of
sort of chemical treatment of the food as you're you're
chewing it up to right, Yeah, the act of chewing
produces saliva, which plays a key role in this first
phase of digestion and again the ultimate preparation of the
bolus that will pass onto the realms below and so final.
For these reasons, chewing is especially important to herbivores and omnivores. Right,

(11:40):
so if you want to like mash up tough fibrous
plant material with your teeth so you can get more
nutrients out of it. You notice there are some animals
that don't chew at all, and they tend to be carnivores. Yeah,
and I think I think about like snakes. So I
don't know if there may be some cases of snakes
doing something like chewing, but generally you know they're going
to be swallowing their prey mostly hall right. Yeah. Another

(12:01):
big example of course the sperm whale, you know which one,
just inhale. A lot of fish also fish also do
this as well, an inhalation of the entire organism. The
ending of anaconda wouldn't be quite the same if John
Voyd had been chewed up before being swallowed exactly. There
is cinematic payoff to that, for sure. Now, there have
been those who put you know, excessive emphasis on chewing.

(12:27):
For instance, I have to mention the work of Horace Fletcher.
Who's he Oh he lived eighteen forty nine through nineteen nineteen,
and he was known as the Great Masticator for and
he was known as by this moniker because of his
teachings of a fletcherizing. So basically his idea was that
not only did you need to chew your food, because

(12:48):
we've all heard that, right, and you know we've we've
heard somebody say that to a child. Makes yeah, chew too,
your food to your food, don't just you know, swallowed.
But he was he would he would have argued that
you need to chew your food to the point of
liquefication in order to properly digest it and just count
your choose, etcetera. And uh he he had some nice
slogans for this, like this was his big issue, and

(13:11):
one of them was nature will castigate those who don't mastigate. Um. Wait,
so this is this is the first smoothie king, Well
before you had blenders. This guy is doing an organic
smoothie revolution. Yeah, he would have loved a vitam x
you know. But but he was also you know, arguing
that that chewing, you know, it's releasing the saliva and

(13:33):
you need a certain amount of saliva to be produced.
So he was all all part of it had to
do with this with the idea of like all the
things that chewing is actually doing and some of these things,
you know, saliva is important. Is it's so important that
you need to chew your drinks like that, because that
was something you are like, if you're you're you're having
a you're drinking something, you need to chew your drink
as well, just to make sure the saliva is being produced.

(13:56):
But a lot of a lot of people were, you know,
we're sucked in by this this line of thinking, including
Dr John Harvey Kellogg. That's not a surprise. Yeah, he
was an adherent, though Kellogg eventually abandoned fletcherizing because he
realized that that wh he decided that fiber was more
important and that fletcherizing might get in the way of

(14:16):
taking in that necessary fiber. Well stopped clock rule. I mean,
John Harvey Kellogg was mostly a crank. But fiber is
very important, important to have a lot in your diet.
But also wasn't John Harvey Kellogg an advocate of like
boring foods. Didn't he suggest like you need to eat
foods that aren't going to like excite the libido and stuff.

(14:36):
He had a lot of ideas, some of which, uh no,
some of them were definitely um, you know, quackery like fletcherizing. Um. Yeah,
he also got into abstinence being an essential part of
his his his his plan for a better life. But
then you know, also we got cereal, some cereals out

(14:56):
of the mix. Yeah. So so yeah, chewing is important,
but not fletcherizing level of important. As we said already,
mastication entails a whole host of facial merchant muscles, so
a certain amount of energy goes into the act. And
if you just look around at our fellow humans, yes,
you'll see a lot of gum chewing, but you'll also
probably notice a lot of other things whin wind up

(15:18):
being chewed by humans. Things like tobacco for sure, but
also various herbal chooes, pencils, pins, toothpicks. Oh, don't chew toothpicks, folks.
I'm not saying do it. I'm just saying, you see
it happened. No, I know we're not recommending any of these,
but especially don't chew toothpicks. Um. You'll see people chewing
uh pacifiers. Sometimes adults will two pass fires that light up. Uh.

(15:42):
And then also night you never heard that, Well, you
see some people like it's like a raver. I don't
know if it's still done, but I used to one
would see it. And then uh, then I myself, I
use a night guard at night, and sometimes I think
of that as chewing, Like basically I'm putting a chew
toy in my mouth and chewing it all night. But

(16:03):
I do have to drive home that this is actually
bruxi is um, which is excessive teeth grinding or jaw clenching,
and it's unrelated to eating. Likewise, there are various chewing
disorders and animals as well that shouldn't necessarily be confused
for examples of normal eating or anything resembling recreational chewing.
And I was wondering about this though, so so, yeah,

(16:25):
if if we see humans chewing things in many cases
seemingly purely for the act of chewing, Like you're chewing
on the end of that pin, why you're not gaining
any nutreents from that pin? You just much you want
something to chew. Uh, And I wonder, sorry, I just
don't know. I thought about ice chewing, ice chewing, ice
chewing freaks me out. I know millions of you out

(16:48):
there probably do it, but it's just please don't do
it around me. It gives me the creepy Well, there's
there's But my point is there's a lot of stuff
we chew and why, And so I was wondering about this,
and I wonder if, to a certain extent this is
because this is like stemming back to a time in
our prehistory in which we were always gathering edible materials.
You know, we were hunter gatherers, and as we gathered,

(17:11):
perhaps we were eating a little bit as we went,
we were tasting, chewing things to see what they were,
or you know, certainly if we recognize what they were
and knew that they had, say like a mild stimulant
to them, perhaps we need to do to chew on
that to keep going. But we probably also a lot
of high fiber potential foods. Yeah, yeah, you kind of like,
you know, you would need to be chewing all the time, right.

(17:32):
I was also I recently learned on a mushroom and
herb foraging tour via a licensed turbalist that an experience
forger can chew, taste, and spit a variety of substances,
so not necessarily chewing, uh, you know, not chewing to eat,
but chewing to sort of taste and help identify a
particular substance, even a mushroom um, because if you're if

(17:54):
something a lot, if you if you chew it and
spit it, you know, you can get a sense of it.
Is it a bitter or is putrid? Whatever the taste
happens to be, and that would aid and experienced individual
in identifying that substance. Well, so I've got a question.
Do bears chew gum? I mean, what are there are
there examples of gum style recreational chewing in the animal

(18:18):
world outside of humans? Well? Um, I looked around for
examples of recreational chewing in animals and there wasn't a
lot to report. Most of it seems to be in
the aid of food selection and consumption, or to do
to some manner of malady or the effects of being
kept in an enclosure. I thought to my own cat,
and occasionally, you know, my cattle do this thing where

(18:39):
she takes the food in her mouth, chew it, let's
it drop out, and then maybe she'll eat it. But
I think that's ultimately part of her tasting the substance
and then deciding whether to eat it. Now, I do
think that there there seemed to be some behaviors in
dogs and perhaps other carnivores that seem to me to
be non feeding for chians, of chewing where they'll chew

(19:01):
on a you know, bone or a stick or something. Yeah, um,
And I wonder if that has to do with like
dental health or something about the teeth what you do
there is there's an element of dental health and some animals,
probably the best example being that of you know, to
a certain extent, uh, you know, birds and dogs chewing
on different items obviously, like a for a like a cat.

(19:23):
And you often see feathers brought up as an example
of something they would kind of chew on roughly, you know,
as it was a way of helping to keep their
teeth clean. Dogs are going to chew on bones obviously,
But then hamsters, for example, it's an animal that needs
to chew in order to keep its ever growing teeth healthy.
It's like sharpening your knives. Yeah, yeah, I guess if
your knives kept growing, if your knives kept growing out

(19:45):
of your skull exactly. But dogs, though you you encourage
me to look into this little bit more because I'm
not a dog owner, but you're a dog owner. Does
your dog like to chew on things in the house. Yes,
he's not as big a chewer as some dogs are,
And I would make a strong distinction, I guess, between
things that are in some way kind of a food
or food analogy, like something that is flavored or something, uh,

(20:10):
you know, raw hide or something like that, versus just
chewing on like chew toys, which which Charlie didn't do
very much, but some dogs do a lot of. Yeah.
I was reading a little bit a bit about this,
so on one have a level like food chew toys
that are made out of some sort of edible material,
Like they'll break those down. Like I was surprised that
that's basically eating. Yeah, I was surprised as a non

(20:32):
dog owner. Like one day I brought this like edible
chew toy over to a friend's house and I was like, Oh,
this will be great this The dog will love this
for weeks and weeks. And the dog proceeded to just
just break it into pieces and eat the whole thing,
and I was I was impressed. A big nasty bloody
wet muzzle when it's done. But but there's this whole

(20:56):
issue of course dogs chewing things they're not supposed to
chew is actually shoes and I found, um, I found
an article in Live Science so where they were talking
to Calling Tennant, a chairman of the UK Canine and
Feline Behavior Association, and uh. They pointed out that okay,
so yes, dogs chew things, uh, but a lot of

(21:17):
times they're chewing things in order to sense them. And
it comes down to not only the not really the
taste necessary, but the smell potential of a dog. They
said that when a when a dog choose on something,
it's like a quote, a human opening a door and
looking into a room. So we have to remember that
all these other animals they're living in their own different

(21:38):
sensory worlds with different levels of sensory input, and a
dog lives in a you know, a high level olfactory universe.
And so chewing on something and releasing the smells of
that thing and the tastes of that thing, um like,
they're interacting with it in a way that we can
scarcely really imagine. And Tennant says, you know, a lot

(22:00):
of the chewing such as the chewing of shoes is
also done out of anxiety. So ultimately a dog is
a pack animal, and it needs the pack for security.
And you humans that you know that live with the dog,
well you are its pack. And so they might chew
on a shoe in order to engage with the smell
of their humans, which is comforting. But then the extra

(22:21):
level of complication there is that a lot of times
our shoes are made out of leather, which leans into
their natural inclination to chew on meat, bones, etcetera. But
but I think that's interesting. I really never really had
thought about that before, Like in the same way that
if we're away from our loved ones, we might pull
up a picture and stare longingly at them, or listen

(22:41):
to them on the phone, listen to our recording brafts,
because we're we're an audio visual leaning species. But what
does an olfactory species do? Uh? You know, they may
chew They're going to chew on a remnant and uh
and and engage with the smell. Uh you know, it's
we can It's difficult to imagine how how humans would
operate if smell was our prime was one of our

(23:03):
more forward sensory perceptions something I think about a lot.
I mean, when you walk a dog, it's kind of
it's it's hard not to notice that the dog is
just by sniffing the world opening many sort of cases. Uh,
it's like, you know, you're detective and you're out like
opening a case constantly by investigating something that I don't

(23:24):
know if those cases ever get closed or how much
information is being provided, but clearly there's just all kinds
of streams of smell based information that the dog is
benefiting from just on you know, walk down the sidewalk
that you're not picking up on at all. On the
other hand, maybe you can enjoy spearmint gum in a
way that a dog can't. So maybe we should take

(23:45):
a break. Yeah, let's take a break, and when we
come back, we will discuss some of the earliest known
examples of something like chewing gum. Alright, we're back. So
the short answer is that, yes, even in ages past
deprived of big league chew and similar items um, you

(24:08):
still have people who are chewing gum. But they were
chewing natural gums and latexts and sometimes harder materials as well,
and they did it for reasons that I you know,
I think we can in many cases say we're recreational,
though it's is is kind of the case in our
recent stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on Tilt with

(24:28):
psychedelics and certain drugs. The term recreational is difficult in
contemplating like why humans consume things or engage in things.
It can be used to say like, this is something
that you're doing purely, you know, for no good reason.
Whereas when you really analyze things that we classify as recreation,
be it something we drink, something we eat, or something

(24:50):
we do like a social engagement, there's often more to it.
It's often more important than that. A recreational is often
used to mean trivial and doesn't necessarily mean that right
as a as the psychedelic enthusiast Bob Jesse I think
would say what's wrong with recreating myself exactly? But then
on top of that, we're going to see some examples

(25:12):
of chewing gum and gum like materials for hygienic reasons, um,
even even health reasons, medics, medicinal reasons. Yeah, and we
see this across many different cultures. Yes, So uh, I
want to talk for a bit about Otsy, the so
called ice man you know, of course, is great. I

(25:32):
would see a wonderful individual to study, uh because you know,
he he preserves some of the activities that that ancient
humans engaged in that we still engage in today, such
as uh tattoos for instance. Oh yeah, I mean there's
so Otsi if you're not familiar, is a Stone Age
mummy from the late fourth century not fourth century, sorry,

(25:53):
the late fourth millennium BC E, discovered in the early
nineteen nineties frozen with his head part of his body
sticking out of a glacier in the Italian Alps. Like
way up in the Italian Alps, and Ossie is a
fascinating subject in so many ways, as you allude to. Um.
We could return to him in a number of ways

(26:13):
in either one of our podcasts, but included among the
many fascinating questions about him are what was he doing
so high up in the mountains, especially since cat scans
of the mummy revealed that he's got an arrowhead lodged
in his shoulder, and he had other injuries that occurred
right before death, showing that he almost certainly died by homicide,

(26:34):
and so like well, you know, this like what six
thousand year old murder mystery or five thousand year old
murder mystery. That that's pretty cool. But one of the
other things about Otzi that's really interesting is his tool kits.
So of course he is a stone age guy up
in the mountains and he's got stone age tools with
him and they're very well preserved. So this includes an

(26:56):
axe that he carried with them that had an awesome
copper blade, and the copper blade has been traced back
to its origins in southern Tuscany, which of course is
hundreds of miles from where Elsie lived. And this copper
blade was secured to the half of the acts by
a couple of means, so it was wrapped with leather straps,

(27:16):
but it was also secured there by a type of
stone age glue made of tar that was created from
the bark of the birch tree. And I want to
focus on this birch bark tar for a second, because
we could probably do an episode of this show on
stone age adhesives ancient glues. I mean, isn't glue a
fascinating invention in its own right? It comes thousands of

(27:39):
years after the byface or knife, but it's sort of
like it's the it's the inverse knife. Yeah, how do
we put things back together or how do we assemble
things as opposed to and disassembled them. Yeah. So, birch
bark tar is this black, sticky plastic substance that's made
from the destructive distillation of arc from the birch tree.

(28:01):
And practically what this means is that your Stone age
human would create this stuff through a delicate proto industrial
process by which they would heat birch bark over a
temperature controlled fire inside an airtight container or at least
a low oxygen environment. And the tar produced by this
process functions is a thermal plastic, meaning it's solid at

(28:24):
room temperature, but the more you heat it up, the
softer and more pliable it gets, so you can, you know,
you heat it up enough, and it can basically become
kind of like a viscous liquid that you can apply
like a glue. Now, obviously having this tar based adhesive
would be useful in the ancient world. Think of all
the stuff you can do with glue. Sure, you can
glue shards of broken pottery back together, but in the

(28:46):
case of Stone Age action heroes like oatsy. You can
use this birch bark tard glue fletching onto aarow shafts,
and you can also use it in conjunction with the
straps I mentioned half to your copper axe head and
hold it in place while you do your whack in
on whatever you do your whack into. Another use would
be for waterproofing things. Yes, as a ceiling exactly. So

(29:09):
the ancient uses of birch bark tar and tree bark
tars in general are are extensive, but one of the
most interesting was a use we have surprisingly clear evidence of.
So I was reading about it in a paper by
Elizabeth M. Aveling and Carl Herron in the journal Antiquity
in nineteen called Chewing Tar in the Early Holocene and

(29:30):
Archaeological and Ethnographic Evaluation. So from all throughout sites in
Northern Europe, including Scandinavia, southern Germany and Switzerland, archaeologists have
recovered lumps of what appears to be ancient tar with
human tooth impressions, and they date from the Mesolithic and
Neolithic periods. They attached to the underside of Neolithic desks.

(29:55):
You know you wonder about that, right, like uh, if
they had had more infrastructure, would be all over the place.
I imagine two. In Neolithic times, it was possible to
step on somebody's chewing material, step on somebody's chewing gum,
and be like, yeah, well, I mean, I guess that's
assuming we know that this was gum, But I'm gonna
make the case it very likely was um. So so yeah,

(30:18):
So they date from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, that's
the middle of the Late Stone Age, going back about
as far as roughly nine thousand years ago, and they're
all described as these amorphous masses, black or brown in color,
that have indentations left by human teeth. So why we're
human teeth biting down on these lumps of ancient tar,

(30:38):
We think very likely it was for some form of
chewing gum, and the authors suggests this as well. Quote.
Although the primary function of teeth is to bite, chew, crunch,
and grind food, chewing plant or animal products serves a
number of alternative roles, such as cleaning teeth and gums,
freshening breath, quenching thirst a levi aiding dental ailments and

(31:01):
sore throats, and as a means of delivering medicinal and
psychoactive agents to the body. Now they talk about maybe
there are a couple of counter explanations for why you
might find tooth marks on old bits of tar, and
these these tooth marks might have reflected some kind of
functional or practical use. Instead of showing that the tar

(31:22):
was chewing gum, for example, it might have been related
to their use as an adhesive. Since birch bark tar
is thermoplastic, maybe chewing softened the tar so that you
could apply it as an adhesive or ceilant. It's sort
of like the hot glue gun is your mouth. You know,
you put the glue stick in, you chew it up,
you heat it with your mouth, and you spit it out.

(31:43):
But the authors don't seem convinced by this because quote
experiments have suggested that a coding of saliva actually reduces
the capacity of the tar to adhere. Another possible explanation
they mentioned is that quote amorphous aggregates formed a stock
of tar to be you reheated from time to time
to facilitate the removal of smaller pieces for use. Once

(32:06):
sufficiently softened, it would then be easy to bite a
piece off. So right, so like your ammunition of tar
to use out in the field as this big piece,
and then you could heat it up a little bit
and bite a piece off to remove it from from
your bandalier of tar basically h So that might be
a possibility, but there seems to be pretty good evidence
that this was just chewing gum uh. And there's some

(32:29):
evidence that chewing tar and tree resin like this has
been passed down through generations in Northern Europe as a
treatment for sore throats and dental complaints even into the
twentieth century, like the author's site Ethnographic studies of tar
and resin chewing behavior conducted by Vilcuna in nineteen sixty
four in the Lap area of northern Sweden, and I

(32:50):
want to read a quote here quote. Vilcuna also notes
an eighteen seventeen account written by Goldland of a church
service in Finland which half of the congregation, all women,
were chewing resin to keep themselves awake. So if you've
got a really boring minister who's putting everybody to sleep,
you chew resin so that you don't fall asleep and

(33:11):
and get in trouble. Gotland noted that people chewed to
pass the time, to keep teeth white, to prevent the
invasion of scurvy into the gums, and to relieve stomach
pains and heartburn. The most enthusiastic chewers were adolescents and
old women. The preparation of chews required practice, so older
women often pre chewed the resin for children. Cool. Well,

(33:36):
you know I have chewed things for my son before. Really, yeah,
I mean it's not that uncommon. It makes sense really
like chewed with your mouth. I'm not judging mean, well,
like okay, well, like if you need to say, for instance,
my son's going through the phase right now where his teeth, uh,
he's changing out his teeth, he's losing the baby teeth
and grown up teeth are coming in. And they made
a couple of times where he hasn't been able to

(33:57):
like bite into an apple. And if the apple's only
snack that I have around that I have at times
like and I don't if I don't have a knife
or something i'man, which I usually don't, I'll bite a
piece off of the apple, take it out of my mouth,
give it to him. And there's actually like a well
that's so sweet. But but even like an earlier ages,
like the sort of preaching chewing or mild pre chewing

(34:18):
of food, not like a complete baby birding type of situation.
There's the argument that you're passing on vital enzymes to
the young child. Uh So, yeah, I think it's not
that weird that grandma would be passing off a piece
of resin to a child and during church that's cool.
So you know, grandma choose it in the first half
of church, and then when it's time for the sermon

(34:40):
to get going, you pass it off to the kids
maybe so keep them occupied. Okay, picking back up with
this quote, though, Although the majority of Vilcuna's ethnographic cases
relate to chewing tree resins, reference is also made to
the chewing of birch mark tar for similar purposes. In
nineteenth century Siberia. The tar had to be prepared in
a specific manner and only women could be present. So

(35:02):
that's kind of interesting, like this gendered secret ritual about
the preparation of the tar for chewing. Other interesting facts
include the fact that the teeth marks and most of
the Stone Age tar lumps appear to have been left
by young people, children and adolescents roughly ages six to fifteen,
and finally, to bring it back to Otsy the author's

(35:24):
site speculation by an author named Spindler in nineteen ninety
four that quote polished sections on the incisors and canines
of the frozen remains of the Neolithic body from the
Austrian Italian Alps may have occurred as a result of
chewing birch bark tar. And I think this is referring
to Otsy himself, to the Iceman. But so I think

(35:45):
this looks like a really good case that going way
back into the Stone Age, people were chewing these lumps
of tar made from tree bark resin as maybe for
medicinal purposes, maybe just recreationally, maybe for aesthetic or hygiene purposes,
but they were definitely chewing them, right, And you can
also have multiple, uh, you know, purposes in play, Like

(36:05):
maybe it starts off as just a way of you know,
heating up the material, we're having it handy for you know,
use in repairing items and whatnot, but then it just
becomes something recreational in nature or you know, they pick
up on the fact that it, uh you know, makes
your teeth appear or feel healthier. Yeah, but we should
say tar are produced by tree bark and resin in

(36:26):
northern Europe is not the only gum that predates modern
industrial chewing gum. There are actually a number of different
gum and resin showing traditions around the world. Right. One
of them is a bitumen, which, uh, there's evidence that
the Aztecs chewed it. This is a black, viscous mixture
of hydrocarbons um that you know is often it can

(36:46):
be obtained naturally or is it or is it residue
from petroleum distillation. We've talked about bitumen on the show
before its role and it's been used basically for a
number of different purposes throughout human history, from you know,
very industrial type uses to make up to the preparation
of mummies, that sort of thing. I think we talked

(37:07):
about how it figured into some hypotheses of the explanation
of Greek fire. Yes, I believe it did. Yeah, well,
I think that was on stuff to blow your mind.
It was, yes, But but that's a great episode because
that's essentially an invention episode. So go listen to that
if you want a nice ancient military secret exploration. But anyway,
the Aztecs are thought to have obtained the bid amen

(37:29):
from natural seepages along the Gulf coast, and females especially
were said to have chewed the bitumen to sweeten their breath.
There's like a strange like gendered element again to chewing
gum traditions. I wonder too, this makes me because I'm
also thinking about other South and meso American practices involving chewing,

(37:49):
and I'm instantly reminded of the like the lengthy process
of creating chocolate, which is something I would love to
just do a whole episode of Invention on chocolate one day.
But chewing is an evolved and I wonder if it,
like if this plays into like, uh, you know, the
division of of labor between male and female members of society,

(38:10):
and like the processing of plants might be something that
was done like by perhaps children in some cases and
or older people back at the camp, while more able
bodied people engaged in like hunting and gathering. Yeah, that's interesting.
Let's keep that in mind because actually I think we're
about to talk about another meso American chewing tradition that
has at least as been recorded with some social gendered elements.

(38:33):
And that substance, of course is chickle, which is totally
that's the basis of chicklets, right, I believe, I guess
so I did. Yeah, chicklets. Yeah, I remember chickolates more.
I remember from from my childhood. But I believe they
still make them. I think it's still a thing. But yeah.
The the Aztecs and the Maya were also said to
have chewed cured latex or chickle from the tropical sapodilla tree. Yeah.

(38:57):
That tree is also known as the men Elkara zapota.
I think that's the scientific name. And it's found primarily
in Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula. And you can
collect the latex from this tree by hacking these Z
shaped cuts in the bark higher up along the trunk,
and this allows the latex to trickle down into a receptacle,

(39:19):
after which it can be boiled to the appropriate viscosity
and then prepared for chewing. Now, historical records indicate there
are a number of reasons why the chickle was chewed.
It was to prevent thirst in some cases, to suppress
appetite or hunger in other cases, uh sometimes to sweeten breath.
It's reported that the Aztecs had many complicated social rules

(39:40):
about how it could be chewed and by who and when. Uh.
There there were gender based expectations and taboos. Apparently chewing
chickle in public was okay for single women and for children,
but married women and widows could only use it in
private as a supposed breath freshener or something, and that
there was an association with it being seen as a

(40:02):
feminine or something, so that men wouldn't be able to
use it in public or would be shamed if they did. Wow.
So this is interesting in geographic areas as far as
separated in times like the Vastic Empire versus in Stone
Age Northern Europe. In Stone Age Northern Europe, it looks
to us like the primary chewers of chewing gum. Then
we're children, and here it's it seems like it was mainly, uh,

(40:26):
something that was only publicly acceptable for children and some women. Now.
Another example of of a chewing substance from history, The
Greeks chewed mastic, which is a plant resin obtained from
the mastic tree, and it was also known as the
tears of chios Um, which is its name for the
Greek island of chios from which a lot of it

(40:48):
was apparently harvested. Uh and it was a call that
because the way was harvested like that, you would you
would have these droplets coming down from the tree and
um from the branches, and they would kind of you know,
solidify and then when you hack them off, they continue
to look like little droplets or tears. But it apparently
had a bitter taste. It was followed we followed by

(41:10):
kind of a pine wood after taste that people liked.
So it seems to have been used as a as
a way of sprucing up your breath, but also was
had some medicinal properties. Uh and and uh and was
you know, used medicinally and may have had a value
to dental health. I believe there they've actually been some
studies that have looked into like to what degree it
actually it still has, you know, a verified impact on

(41:33):
dental hygiene. Yeah. And now there was some chewing traditions
also farther north in the North America among the indigenous people's,
some of whom chewed the residin of the spruce trees.
The early European colonists to North America picked up on
the practice of chewing spruce tree residin as well, and
then eventually spruce tree resin was turned into an early

(41:54):
version of commercial chewing gum. I think it was in
like the eighteen forties that there was this guy named
John Curtis who developed a process for commercially producing spruce
tree gum that would involve like boiling down the resin
and then cutting it up into strips and coding them
in a in a powder that would keep them from
sticking together. And I guess he made some money. Now,

(42:16):
obviously we're not gonna have time to discuss everything that
humans have chewed and continue to chew on the podcast here,
but I do want to just point out that, uh,
you know a few examples that come to mind in
part because of their uh they're they're stimulating properties. So
a crayon nut and beetle leaf chewed together. This goes

(42:37):
back to thousands of years in East Asia and the
Indian subcontinent and still is in You still see people
doing this today. When chewed, it releases a mild stimulant
much like nicotine, but also it has a carcinogen in
it that's bad, you know, ultimately bad for your health. Uh.
Sometimes additional herbs were also added to it for flavor. Likewise,

(42:58):
chewing tobacco. Chewing tobacco leaves dates back to pre Columbian
times in North and South America, again chewing it in
order to release a mild stimulant. And then yet another example,
the coca leaf, from of course, from which you know,
one can brew it into a tea to create coca tea.
Cocaine is also derived from the coca coca plant, but

(43:20):
chewing it, chewing the leaves was a longstanding way of
acquiring uh this the stimulant properties, and ultimately chewing has
always been a way of of, you know, dipping into
the powers of a particular plant or substance. You know,
if there's some sort of medicinal property, some sort of
stimulant property, uh, some sort of psychoactive property, chewing it

(43:42):
is in many cases a way to release it, especially
if the substance is not something you really want to
swallow and digest, but you do want some of the
chemicals inside it. Well, another way of thinking about that
is that chewing again, as part of our defense mechanism
against poisons, right, a way of determining are their toxins here?
And of course part of the large part of human
history is figuring out which toxins you like, which toxins

(44:06):
are useful, uh, and in and in what quantities? Uh.
And this goes beyond like medicines and drugs obviously, but
you know, like just flavoring peppers and uh, you know,
all matter of things that we used in our culinary traditions,
their toxins we acquired from the environment, figured out exactly
how we wanted to use these evolved chemical weapons for

(44:26):
our own culinary purposes. All right, well, I think we
need to take one more break and then we come back.
We'll see how Santa Anna figures into this story. Alright,
we're back, and yes, you heard that right, Santa Anna,
the Santa Anna. Yeah. It's one of these just really

(44:48):
I think, ultimately kind of unexpected and quirky collisions in history. Yeah.
So the next big page in the story of Chewing
Gum takes us to meet this unexpected figure, an Tonio
Lope Day Santa Anna, the larger than life nineteenth century
Mexican military commander, revolutionary politician, statesman president of Mexico who

(45:09):
fought for Mexican independence. Went on to be President of
Mexico I think multiple terms. Uh, And then of course
later got exiled. In eighteen sixty nine, Santa Anna was
exiled in the United States and living on Staten Island,
and sometime around then he became interested in the idea
of trying to develop chickle, the cured latex from that tree.

(45:30):
Chickle he wanted to develop as an industrial substitute for
rubber in the production of tires, and Santa Anna thought
that the profits he reaped from the development of a
rubber substitute based on chickle would be enough to fund
him in a return to power in Mexico, and he
somehow became connected to an American inventor named Thomas Adams

(45:54):
who lived eighteen eighteen and nineteen o five. Adams was
based in New York and Adams try had to do this.
Adams tried to develop a volcanization process for chickle. Adams
was also a photographer. I understand, Oh really, yeah, I
didn't know that, which makes sense, you know, given that timeframe,
you know, given what we've discussed in the show about
photography and the sort of minds that you know, in

(46:15):
creative types and inventive thinkers that had attracted chemistry in
the eighteen sixties and seventies, that would be photography too. Yeah,
uh so I can see that. But of course he
did not succeed in coming up with a vulcanization process
for chickle. So when it became clear that there weren't
going to be any real profits off of the off
of trying to create a rubber substitute of chickle, Sam

(46:37):
and a lost interest in the venture, but Adams stuck
with it. He Adams went on to discover that the
treated chickle had interesting properties of its own. So it
was not water soluble, so it wouldn't dissolve in a
wet environment like the mouth, and it was very plastic
and very stretchy. And by this time there was already
chewing gum. To find out in the world many a

(46:59):
mayor Parkins had become accustomed to chewing gum based on
that old spruce tree resin we were talking about, but
also manufacturers had largely substituted sweetened paraffin, wax and other
substances for the original spruce resin. And in eighteen seventy
one Adams got on this train. He patented a process
for preparing chickle for chewing, and he sold it as

(47:22):
an alternative to paraffin wax for gum chewers, and originally
I think his recipe was unsweetened gum, but by the
eighteen eighties Adams chickle based gums were nationally distributed and
chickle remained one of the most common ingredients in chewing
gum until later, I think around the middle of the
twentieth century, when more synthetic materials became more common. I

(47:44):
think that the whole like unsweetened sweetened divide is really
interesting because it seems here it starts off as being
essentially just purely recreational chewing, right, I mean, yeah, you
can make a sense, you know, an argument for you know,
basic like basic dental hygiene and the freshening of the breath. Certainly,
but it's not it's not you know, contain, it's not

(48:05):
full of tobacco. It doesn't have a stimulant property to it.
But then you add the sugar, and in doing so
and adding a sweetener to the gum, uh, you make
it a vehicle for this addictive substance that also has
plenty of detrimental uh uh, you know health impacts. You

(48:25):
know that is going to ultimately lead to the deterioration
of your teeth, and it can lead to to other
health problems as well. Yeah, when we've been talking about
gum for you know, people using it for dental health purposes,
I would suspect that whatever those purposes, those valid purposes,
maybe the introduction of sugar probably counteracts all of that,

(48:48):
does more damage than good. And then it's ultimately it's
it's as much about the sugary sweet rush as it
is about anything else. I mean, even with you know,
sugar free gums today. Uh, you know, I admit that
it's that that that rush of artificial sweetener is sometimes
part of the enjoyment of it, Like you anticipate putting
that fresh, untouched piece of gum into your mouth because

(49:11):
you're going to get that just fresh burst of flavor. Yeah, Robert,
I found an ad for for the Adams Chewing Gum Company.
Was called there Adams California Fruit Chewing Gum. I think
this ad was one featured on the Wikipedia page for
the Atoms Fruit Company or the Atoms Chewing Gum Company.
And this, uh, this ad is crazy. It looks like

(49:33):
something from a much later time because it's got it's
like this goddess in ecstasy, putting it looks like fruit
into her mouth. But I guess it's suggesting it's the gum.
I'm not quite sure. Interesting, so again via the goddess imagery,
there's this kind of you know, feminization of chewing gum. Yeah, well,

(49:53):
I mean this would have been so if this was
in the late eighteen hundreds, this would have been around
the time that we got the wash the article in
the British Medical Journal and the other publications talking about
chewing gum being this like disgusting thing that young women do.
You know, it's interesting to to to think about like
dental health concerns because it brings me back to our

(50:15):
episode on toothpaste and about just like the the increasing
need for toothpaste or an effective substance like toothpaste to
keep up with the the influx of sugars and other um,
you know, mainly sugars into the human diet, uh and
leading to a lot of dental problems. And of course

(50:36):
one of the problems with having poor dental whole hygiene
is you're going to have poor breath as well, You're
gonna have halitosis and uh uh. And so perhaps there
was an increase I mean once tempted to think there
might have been an increase in the demand for some
sort of breath freshening product. But at the same time,
when we see that that outside of the European context,

(50:58):
it seems like there's always been or there there has
long been a need for some sort of breath freshening product.
So I'm not sure we're exactly to land on that,
but without a doubt, the influx of sugar into uh,
the diet, of the European diet during this time would
have led to some bad breath, no doubt about that.

(51:19):
And remember again, um brushing teeth with toothpaste was not
a really widespread common practice until like the twentieth century,
right right, So we're kind of in the dark ages
of like that where where the where the diet had
grown worse, but the but the the dental hygiene practices
had not risen up to meet the demand. Yet, you know,

(51:41):
I was just thinking another thing that I suspect very
likely to be opera ended, like that British Medical Journal
article and and the other ones talking about the actresses
and and young ladies students chewing gum is probably just
the same sort of like sexist trend detection that causes
like adult men to think that girl younger girls are

(52:03):
always on their phones, not noticing that boys are just
as much men are on on their phones all the
time as well. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. There's
probably a word for that, like sex selective print trend detection.
I'm not sure what the it's probably out there. Oh
but hey, we gotta talk about Wriggley's Oh yeah, bring
it on. So another big name in the history of

(52:24):
chewing gum, of course is William Wriggley Jr. Uh, Wriggley
is just a great last name. It implies that you're
some kind of eel like writhing around and you can't
can't get a grip on you. So Wriggley of course
began as a salesman. You know, there are a lot
of salesman making it big around this time. In the
eight nineties, he was trying to establish himself as a

(52:46):
seller of commercial goods, and he ran like Bogo style
promotions where customers you'd buy one product, you get another product,
right so maybe, but I don't know what they really
You might buy a velocipede and you get a free
box of snuff. But but apparently one of his very
popular promotional giveaways was chewing gum. And Wrigley was so
impressed with how popular the chewing gum was as a

(53:08):
promotional giveaway that he was like, well, I should just
sell chewing gum. So he decided to get into the
gum business, launching brands of his own, including brands like Wriggly,
Spearmint uh. And I was reading a history dot com
article by Elizabeth Knicks about some of his marketing practices.
I just want to quote this because this is so great.
H So those from Nick's article quote. Because the chewing

(53:29):
gum field had grown crowded with competitors, Wrigley decided he'd
make his products stand out by spending heavily on advertising
and direct marketing. In nineteen fifteen, the Wrigley Company kicked
off a campaign in which it sent free samples of
its gum to millions of Americans list listed in phone books.
Another promotion entailed sending sticks of gum to US children

(53:53):
on their second birthday. I hadn't really thought about how
easy it is to mail a piece of gum, but
of course it is an can stick it in a
pack of baseball cards. It's it'll stick in an envelope
as well. Second birthday? Did I read that right? Second birthday?
Should kids beat you in gum when they're two? I mean,

(54:14):
probably not. I don't remember letting my son have have gum.
I kind of I kind of discourage gum now and
he's seven, but but he really he wants it, you know,
like when he sees one of those big gumball machines,
of course he wants to get a giant gumball and
stick it in his mouth. I mean, I'm no expert
on raising children, but something seems wrong there. I don't
think two year olds are supposed to have gum right

(54:37):
fresher than the mail though, But still isn't genius direct marketing? Yeah,
you should have been in the direct marketing of cocaine.
That would work even better. I'm glad you brought that up.
I'm gonna I'm gonna come back to that question. Well,
I mean, so after this period we get more into
the modern styles of gum were you know, after World
War two or so, many natural gum bases like chickle

(54:58):
were largely being replaced east with new sym synthetic rubbers
and waxes, and that sort of led us to the
gum world we have today. Of course, we've got you know,
all kinds of other things, artificial sweeteners and all that. Yeah,
you get your spicy gums, you get your fruit gums,
you get your flavor crystals, you get your gravy flavored gums.
Maybe there's a lot of novelty gum. There's a lot

(55:19):
of novelty gum. It's sure, it sure is. But then
you still have like the very traditional juicy fruit style gum.
Like it's really we live in a golden age of
chewing and bubble gum. Now. To come back to something
we we touched on at the very beginning is that
it's this idea that chewing gum also helps you focus,

(55:39):
you know, not merely you know, in a pro wrestling
ring or or you know, on on the sports field,
but but like just you know, say, setting in a
desk working that it can help focus your mind. Yeah,
and this has actually been the subject of a lot
of research. Strangely enough, I wonder how much of it
is funded by the chewing gum industry, I think, right,
But there have been ton of studies in in psychology

(56:02):
and uh, I don't know what other fields this would
apply to. I guess would be in psychology, where the
question is does chewing gum make people do better on
various kinds of cognitive tasks? And there appears to be,
at least as far as I was reading, some evidence
that there's a little bit of a cognitive boost that
people get from chewing gum. But it appears to apply

(56:25):
for a few minutes after gum has been chewed, not
while you're chewing gum, or at least that's what I
found in for example, I studied from two thousand eleven
published an appetite by Hour at All called Cognitive Advantages
of Chewing Gum. Now you see them, now you don't uh,
And so it was talking about giving people a battery
of cognitive tests either while they were chewing gum or

(56:47):
after they chewed gum, compared with the performance of controls
who didn't chew anything at all, and the right quote,
chewing gum was associated with performance advantages on multiple measures
when gum was chewed five minutes before but not ring
cognitive testing. The benefits, however, persisted only for the first
fifteen to twenty minutes of the testing session. And did
not extend to all cognitive domains. To explain this pattern

(57:11):
of results, it's proposed that the time limited nature of
performance benefits can be attributed to mastication induced arousal. Maybe
Fletcher was right. Yeah, well, I mean it comes back
to the fact that when you're chewing, you're using a
whole lot of muscles in your face, you're producing saliva.
It's uh, I could see, yeah, it's it's waking you
up a little bit. I mean, it's the comes back

(57:31):
to chewing gum and church, right. Yeah. But then also
there's probably a conflict the author's thing going on when
you're trying to chew gum while you're doing a task,
because you might be benefiting from some arousal, but you're
also sort of lightly dividing your attention if you're also chewing. Oh,
that's true. And then when you're done chewing, you're you're
revved up. Now you're ready to go. Yeah, so you

(57:52):
have this mild increase. So yeah, it seems to me
that there might be a little bit of a cognitive
boost from from chewing gum a little bit after you chew,
but it doesn't seem earth shaking. I wonder why this
hasn't though led to more Like I'm sure there's some
products out there that are marketed as being like a
like a performance enhancing gum, and uh, I assure, yeah,

(58:17):
but performance enhancing everything. But given how how much marketing
is out there regarding you know, various you know, attention boosting,
memory boosting, uh, herbal supplements and so forth, Like, why
am I not being bombarded with marketing for gums that
contain the same thing? Because when you look back to
our history of chewing things again, in many cases we're

(58:40):
chewing things in order to get some sort of uh,
you know, a mild stimulant out of the material we're chewing.
You look even to nicotine gum today used as a
way of, you know, of of getting people off of
off of cigarettes and having them consume their nicotine through
chewable gum, which you would chew I think for like
fifteen min it's at a time I think that's the uh,

(59:02):
the idea. Uh So why don't we Why haven't we
seen more drug delivery through chewing gum during the history
of chewing gum? I wonder if it falls back into
like the gender divide that seemed to be there is
that why we didn't have cocaine gums. I wonder, I
mean I when when you talk about the performance enhancing
gum concept, I mean cynical part of me wonders if

(59:22):
it's just cheaper to make placebo pills than it is
to make placebo gums. Yeah, but who knows what the
future will hold. It is worth pointing out with the
cannabis gums are already on the market, it should not
come as a surprise to anybody um. And then likewise,
there's continued research into things we might be able to

(59:42):
do with gum. For instance, there's some studies looking at
using gums containing um uh phospho peptide, amorphous calcium phosphate,
and xylotol as a way of creating gums that are
even healthier for our dental hygiene. That it could be
you know, mark get even more for dental health. Likewise,

(01:00:03):
chewing gum may also impact our wearable technology. Uh. There's
a two thousand fifteen Time article by Alexandra uh Sifferlan
who discussed Applied Materials and Interfaces Journal article in which
the researchers treated chewed gum like pre chewed gum that
one of the researchers that chew they treated it with
ethanol and carbon nanotubes to create a sensor that could

(01:00:24):
quote detect body motion and humidity changes, which could be
used to track breathing. Uh. But in this, you know,
it's not so much the gum is a thing that's chewed,
but as coming back to the material itself, you know,
which is an interesting interesting to look at this chain,
you know, from from things we chew two glues and

(01:00:45):
rubbers back into chewing gum and then perhaps into meta
materials that will be useful in the future. Interesting. Yeah,
I had to know this was going to get into
carbon nanotube based chewing gum, smart gum of the future.
I mean, I wonder if there's been any cool slife
by treatments of that, like some sort of smart chewing
gum that you chew it up and now it's activated
and you can use it for all sorts of elaborate things. Well,

(01:01:08):
you know, I feel like I only chew VANTI black. Well,
it does remind mcgiver would use a bubble gum, right,
maybe use chewing gum to fix things and there, you know,
and and in that he's kind of getting it kind
of brings us back to the iceman and potential applications
of the material they were chewing. So, uh, you know,
it all comes full circle. Well, this episode has certainly

(01:01:30):
provided me with some things to chew over. I hope
we didn't I hope we didn't bite off more than
we could chew. Uh hopefully not. Hopefully not. But here's
one thing that that's for certain. Everybody out there listening
to this episode probably has something to share, you know
about either your personal relationship with gum, what you like,

(01:01:51):
what you don't like, or other chewable substances. What's your
relationship with them. Perhaps you're from a culture that has
a has a traditional chewed substance. If if that's the case,
let us know. I'd love to hear from you if
you ever uh have you ever chewed coco leaves? Uh
in uh you know in South America? Uh, you know,
in a while on a hike. I would be interested

(01:02:13):
to hear about that. Are you a former tobacco chew
or do you have any insights about that habit? Uh?
Maybe you didn't like something we said and you were
going to write in to chew us out. At any rate,
whatever your feedback might be uh, we would love to
hear from you uh, and you can reach out to us,
but before you do, be sure to check out invention
pot dot com. That's the mother ship. That's where we

(01:02:34):
find all the episodes of this show. And if you
want to support Invention the best things you can do
or of course make sure you have subscribed to it,
make sure you're telling your friends about it. And if
you have the ability to leave us a nice you know,
assortment of stars or a nice review wherever you got
this podcast, well we urge you to do so because
that really helps us out huge Thanks as always to

(01:02:55):
our excellent audio producer, Maya Cole. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feed back on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is
production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart

(01:03:17):
Radio is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H