Does Gum Stay in your Stomach for Seven Years?

Does gum really stay in your stomach for Seven Years? Josh and Chuck take on the parental myth of gum swollowing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from how stuff Works dot Com? Hi, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, staff writer here at how
stuff works dot com. And with me for the first
of what I only hope will be many times is

(00:20):
my fellow staff writer staff writer extraordinary actually, Charles Bryant. Great,
those very kind things. Yeah, yeah, well thanks for coming.
Appreciate it. So, Chuck, I have a question for you.
When you were a kid and you popped a piece
of gum in your mouth, were you ever told that
if you swallowed it that it would stay in you
for seven years? I was. I was told that all

(00:41):
the time, and I don't choose them today for that reason. Wow,
that's that's horrible, because, as it turns out, that's a
that's a lie perpetrated by adults on young children, which
is terrible in and of itself. But um, you want
to tell us what gum is, Well, yeah, I'm really
not sure why they would say things like this because
gum is really kind of harmless. I don't know who

(01:02):
started that whole the whole lie, but gum is really
just four different things. Josh. It's it's a flavor, it's sweetener,
it's softener, and it's the gun base. And uh, the
good news is that three of those things can be
broken down by our body. Yeah, and uh it's you know,
when those things break down actually is when gum loses
its flavor, which is when most people toss come out.

(01:25):
But I understand you actually swallow your gum. I loved
to swallow my gum. I haven't spent a piece of
gum out since I was like two years old. So
when I was researching this, I was I was really
glad to find, you know, personally that that that it
isn't true at all. I bet, I bet that was
pretty scary before it was for you. You know that
that basse you were talking about. The the component in
question right actually dates back to about eighteen sixty a

(01:48):
guy named General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Does that
name ring a bell? Uh? You know, I think I've
heard of him. But what he was the guy who
captured the albuma actually slaughtered all of the defenders inside
right were remember him? Well? No, you you remember the
guys who are defending it. Actually that probably depends on
whether you're from Mexico or the US. Uh yeah, two

(02:08):
sides of the same coin. But anyway, Uh. Santa Anna
achieved later fame, well kind of fame, by introducing chickle
to a guy named Thomas Adams, and his name might
also ring a bell. He made that awful gum what
a black liquorice gum. But Adams made a mint off
of it, and he actually had a contract with Santa Anna.

(02:31):
Um too, I guess sharing the proceeds since Santa Anna
introduced him introduced a chickle to him. But chickle is
you know, it's the gum base Yeah cheek lay actually,
uh it was. It basically took gum into the nineteenth
century or the twenties century, now the twenty feet century.
So um. Thomas Adams actually didn't honor his contract, and

(02:53):
by this time Santa Anna, who was in exile and
um had lost a leg, was now left any listen
destitute New York thanks to Adams getting us penny listen
and legless penny listen legless. Yeah, not a good combination, um,
But long story short, Santa Anna introduced this component uh

(03:13):
that that that mothers everywhere have lied to their children
about not being digestible to gum. So, I mean, if
we have this base, if we have this uh, this
this item in question, what you know that can't be
broken down? You know? Why? Why doesn't it stick around? Well,
it's basically like anything else you put in your mouth,
josh uh. It goes down your esophagus and into your stomach,

(03:35):
and enzymes and acids kind of start bubbling up and
they break everything down. So far, so good. Yeah, And
then what can't be broken down there um gets broken
down in the intestines. Um, Your liver and pancreas kind
of help out the intestines there. And then what's left
after that is just the gun base, and that moves
into your colon and it's pretty much a one way

(03:56):
street from there. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to go
the other way because they could be very bad. And
actually there have been a couple of occasions that that
support from this this old wives tale at gum stays
in you for seven years. The poor kid as we
call him, we yeah, we've been calling him around the
office poor kid, right uh and and quite rightly. Poor
Kid was a four year old who had suffered intense

(04:20):
constipation for half of his life, two years, and it's
no wonder why No, Actually, his parents, it turns out,
had been um potty training him and any time he
was successful, they gave him a piece of gum. And
apparently this kid was really successful. He was good on
the potty, Yeah he was. He was getting like five
to seven pieces of gum a day and swallowing all
of them. So I guess his parents were really focused

(04:41):
on the potty training and not the fact that he
wasn't spinning this gum out. And you know what was
the result, Well, well, poor kids taken to the doctor.
The doctors finally, I guess, crack them open and they
find um, which is, I guess described by the finest
assemblage of words I've ever seen in my entire life,
a taffy like trail of fecal material real and poor kid, yeah,

(05:02):
ter right. So well, the good news is that they
were able to suction all this out of his rectum
and send him along his merry way, which I imagine
was a life changing experience for poor kiddy. He does
stand as a cautionary tale, though, although he didn't crack
the seven year mark, he was only four when this
procedure was done, which is, I guess a good thing
for everybody, right, and the world will never know. It's

(05:22):
like a tipsy pop right, how many lives? If you
want to know any more gross stuff about gum and
digestion get rida? Does gum really stay in you? For
seven years on how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send
an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.

(05:46):
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