A few months back, I read that microplastics have been found to be in chewing gum. And not just the mass produced stuff, where one could reasonably expect that producers may cut corners on quality of ingredients to keep cranking out their offerings, but microplastics were found even in the likes of more natural brands of gum with fewer, less man-made ingredients.
I’ve chewed gum pretty routinely since I was in high school — for something nearing four decades, it’s been rare that I was out and about without gum in my mouth and with more in a pocket or bag — and this microplastics news came as an eye-opener to me. So wait, all this time I’ve been putting more microplastics into my body? Ugh.
The day I hear that, I quit chewing gum completely. But, now feeling at a bit of a loss for having fresher breath, I turned to sugar-free mints instead. There’s a popular brand that sells their mints in little, oblong metal tins. They do the trick on the breath-freshening front, though my decades-long habit of chewing such flavours led to my crunching on them too often and, long story short, I’m seeing my dentist the day I write this to fill in a tooth I’ve taken a “sizeable chunk” from (to quote the hygienist) from said mint chewing.
Let’s chalk that up to it being a… time of adjustment.
This news about gum came soon after J and me catching part of a Nature of Things episode taking about microplastics. As a huge oversimplification, they’re absolutely everywhere around the planet, and in items we consume everyday, from air to water to food. And as a result of that, they’re in all of us.
And they may also be bad for us. Maybe really bad. Early studies suggest that microplastics in our brain — yes, as you read this, there are microplastics in that big, beautiful, brain of yours— may lead to ailments like dementia, perhaps earlier than we would have had dementia anyway, and perhaps in those who wouldn’t have otherwise had it. But there’s a definite finding of people with dementia having more microplastics in their brains than in those without dementia. The findings are there, it’s just yet to be determined if there’s a correlation or causation. Whatever the case, microplastics are probably something we don’t want… you know… in us.
Hence my quitting gum.
But here’s the thing that’s got me up in my head about it: There’s so much plastic coming into direct contact with our everyday food (and again, air and water) that microplastics are probably literally impossible to completely avoid.
Consider an everyday shopping trip: You buy meat that’s on a plastic tray and sealed with plastics. Or that’s in shrink-wrapped plastic. You buy veggies that are in plastic packaging or that you put in a plastic bag to carry them to buy and then carry them home in. Salads come in plastic bags, juice and pop and sometimes milk all comes in plastic bottles, heart-healthy butter replacement come in plastic tubs, frozen foods are wrapped in plastic, granola bars and snacks come in plastic wrappers or Mylar (which is a plastic), cereal comes in cardboard boxes that hold plastic bags with the food in it, crackers come in plastic sleeves, our pet food and treats comes in large plastic bags… the list goes on and on. Then it continues at home, when we store leftover food which is probably in some type of plastic container…
And so it goes. When you take a step back for a wider overview, you find that plastics are part of so much of the packaging, presentation and/or convenience our everyday food items that it becomes impractical, if even possible, to completely avoid it coming into contact with your food, and so leaving microplastics in your food.
… all of which brings me back to gum. Because what I’ve been wondering is, given all of the above, is there really any point in stopping chewing it? I’ve long said that any progress is good, because it’s still progress. But in this particular case, while dropping gum from my life is better than nothing, it’s in such a miniscule amount compared to everything else around me, does it actually matter?
Like, look: I’m already consuming X amount of microplastics daily from all this food that has come to me in direct contact with plastic for days or weeks or months, so is there really any point in denying myself a causal enjoyment of chewing gum that effectively only changes that intake by a tiny fraction of one percent? Any progress is still progress, it’s true, but scientifically speaking, is there effectively any point in even bothering with that progress if what I chew anyway remains 99.9997% (or whatever) the same as it had been?
Bottom line, is there any health benefit to deftly avoiding the smidge of microplastics in gum when I willingly continue to consume so much more, what’s got to be hundreds or even thousands of times more, just in everyday living?
Thoughts?