Episode Details

Chewing Gum and Microplastics — What Ranjodh Singh Revealed on Radio Haanji 1674 AM That Every Parent Needs to Know

There are things we hand our children without a second thought — a stick of chewing gum being one of them. It is harmless, we assume. Just a little treat. But in a recent episode of his podcast on Radio Haanji 1674 AM, host Ranjodh Singh sat down with some deeply unsettling research, and what he shared has prompted a genuine conversation across the Punjabi and Indian community in Australia. The science, it turns out, tells a very different story from the one printed on the wrapper.

Every Piece of Chewing Gum Is Releasing Thousands of Plastic Particles Into Your Body

The findings that Ranjodh Singh discussed come from two major pieces of research — one led by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and presented at the American Chemical Society's Spring 2025 meeting, and another published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, led by Queen's University Belfast.

The UCLA study examined ten commercially available chewing gums — five synthetic and five marketed as natural — and found that every single one of them released microplastics into saliva during chewing. On average, each gram of gum shed approximately 100 microplastic particles, though some pieces released as many as 600 particles per gram. Since a large stick of gum can weigh up to six grams, a single piece alone can release more than 3,000 plastic particles into a person's mouth. A person who chews 160 to 180 pieces of gum per year — a moderate habit by most standards — could be ingesting close to 30,000 microplastics from gum alone, on top of the tens of thousands already entering the body through water, food packaging, and other daily sources.

The Queen's University Belfast study went even further, tracking microplastic release over a full hour of chewing a single piece of gum. The results were striking: over 250,000 microplastic and nanoplastic particles were detected in the saliva of the study participant over that period. Crucially, the researchers found microplastics in every sample collected across the hour — from the first twenty minutes through to the final set — which led them to state that there may be no safe chewing duration. Both research teams noted that the instruments used can only detect particles above a certain size threshold, meaning the actual counts are almost certainly an underestimate. Nanoplastics — far smaller than microplastics and significantly more capable of penetrating human tissue — were likely present in far greater numbers than the studies were able to capture.

Natural Gum Is Not the Answer Either — The Industry's Quiet Problem

When parents and health-conscious consumers started paying attention to what goes into synthetic chewing gum, the market responded predictably. Natural gum brands — using chicle, tree sap, or other plant-based polymers — began positioning themselves as the safe alternative. It is a persuasive argument: plant-based sounds inherently cleaner, more wholesome, less industrial.

The research does not support this distinction. Both the UCLA and Queen's University Belfast studies found that natural gums released microplastics and nanoplastics at comparable levels to their synthetic counterparts. The UCLA team specifically noted their surprise at this finding — they had hypothesised that synthetic gums, whose base is derived from petroleum-based polymers, would release significantly more