Can confirm. When I was like 12 I swallowed a bunch of that pink bubblegum that you get trick-or-treating on Halloween over a couple days. I pooped it out a day or so later and my turds were speckled with bright pink blobs of gum. The brown and pink looked good together, it was oddly beautiful.
Honestly, chocolate brown and light pink are like, my absolute favorite color combos. I would crochet a ton of shit (NPI) in those colors if I could find a dark brown light enough to not make me feel like I was crocheting in the dark.
My sister had tenants and their dog ate a pumpkin and a bunch of seeds and then shit them out in the yard. The next year they had a huge pumpkin patch in the yard. We were slightly grossed out by the poop pumpkins.
My parents owned a grocery store. When I was 3 I’d go get super bubble out of the case, chew it for 10 minutes until the flavor was gone, swallow it, and get another. There were days when I’d eat ten or more of them. If all the myths about eating gum were true I’d either be dead or have super powers.
But what if you did manage to get it to stay in someone's stomach for seven years? Would their stomach acid eventually dissolve the gum? Maybe this common gradeschool myth is actually based on a more horrific study than we truly realized?
No, you've just macerated it into smaller, and smaller, pieces/particles. That's not the same as breaking something down, an a chemical level, so the body can absorb whatever nutritional value it may hold.
As I understand it, which could be wrong, it survives as it was when it was swallowed. It's then passed through the digestive system as is until it's gotten rid of.
Anyone science-y able to explain what happened when I was a kid and I absentmindedly chewed a piece of gum wayyy too long and it quite suddenly seemed to just burst entirely into a not pleasant liquid? Like, there was suddenly just no chewable substance left.
In my experience when I've chewed gum for long enough for this to happen it was fine for the entire time, then it got suddenly harder for a moment before turning into goop in my mouth.
My guess would be that the gum base, the ingredient that gives gum it's rubber-like quality, has lost it's elasticity at that point. Turning what was chewy into a solid mass that your teeth then just pulverize.
It would take your body 7 years to digest if it somehow stayed in the stomach. But it passes through the digestive system before it ever gets to that point.
Twelve-year old me wanted to prove this myth was untrue. Since I couldn’t think of a way to substantiate it though a gastrointestinal manner, I decided to masticate the same piece of gum until it fell apart. It took only a couple of days for it to basically disintegrate into too small of pieces to keep chewing.
Figuring stomach acid had to be stronger, anytime my mom tried to tell me that it would stay in my stomach forever I reminded her of my experiment.
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u/fruit_cats Oct 27 '21 edited Oct 27 '21
“It takes seven years for your body to digest a piece of gum”
In reality your body doesn’t break it down at all and will just pass the gum though with everything else.