Latest / Stuff You Should Know / Does Gum Stay in your Stomach for Seven Years?
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
- 0:03Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
- 0:08Speaker 1: from how stuff Works dot Com? Hi, and welcome to
- 0:12Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, staff writer here at how
- 0:15Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. And with me for the first
- 0:17Speaker 1: of what I only hope will be many times is
- 0:20Speaker 1: my fellow staff writer staff writer extraordinary actually, Charles Bryant. Great,
- 0:27Speaker 1: those very kind things. Yeah, yeah, well thanks for coming.
- 0:29Speaker 1: Appreciate it. So, Chuck, I have a question for you.
- 0:32Speaker 1: When you were a kid and you popped a piece
- 0:34Speaker 1: of gum in your mouth, were you ever told that
- 0:36Speaker 1: if you swallowed it that it would stay in you
- 0:38Speaker 1: for seven years? I was. I was told that all
- 0:41Speaker 1: the time, and I don't choose them today for that reason. Wow,
- 0:44Speaker 1: that's that's horrible, because, as it turns out, that's a
- 0:46Speaker 1: that's a lie perpetrated by adults on young children, which
- 0:50Speaker 1: is terrible in and of itself. But um, you want
- 0:54Speaker 1: to tell us what gum is, Well, yeah, I'm really
- 0:57Speaker 1: not sure why they would say things like this because
- 1:00Speaker 1: gum is really kind of harmless. I don't know who
- 1:02Speaker 1: started that whole the whole lie, but gum is really
- 1:05Speaker 1: just four different things. Josh. It's it's a flavor, it's sweetener,
- 1:10Speaker 1: it's softener, and it's the gun base. And uh, the
- 1:14Speaker 1: good news is that three of those things can be
- 1:16Speaker 1: broken down by our body. Yeah, and uh it's you know,
- 1:19Speaker 1: when those things break down actually is when gum loses
- 1:22Speaker 1: its flavor, which is when most people toss come out.
- 1:25Speaker 1: But I understand you actually swallow your gum. I loved
- 1:28Speaker 1: to swallow my gum. I haven't spent a piece of
- 1:30Speaker 1: gum out since I was like two years old. So
- 1:32Speaker 1: when I was researching this, I was I was really
- 1:33Speaker 1: glad to find, you know, personally that that that it
- 1:36Speaker 1: isn't true at all. I bet, I bet that was
- 1:39Speaker 1: pretty scary before it was for you. You know that
- 1:42Speaker 1: that basse you were talking about. The the component in
- 1:44Speaker 1: question right actually dates back to about eighteen sixty a
- 1:48Speaker 1: guy named General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Does that
- 1:51Speaker 1: name ring a bell? Uh? You know, I think I've
- 1:53Speaker 1: heard of him. But what he was the guy who
- 1:55Speaker 1: captured the albuma actually slaughtered all of the defenders inside
- 1:59Speaker 1: right were remember him? Well? No, you you remember the
- 2:02Speaker 1: guys who are defending it. Actually that probably depends on
- 2:05Speaker 1: whether you're from Mexico or the US. Uh yeah, two
- 2:08Speaker 1: sides of the same coin. But anyway, Uh. Santa Anna
- 2:12Speaker 1: achieved later fame, well kind of fame, by introducing chickle
- 2:16Speaker 1: to a guy named Thomas Adams, and his name might
- 2:18Speaker 1: also ring a bell. He made that awful gum what
- 2:25Speaker 1: a black liquorice gum. But Adams made a mint off
- 2:28Speaker 1: of it, and he actually had a contract with Santa Anna.
- 2:31Speaker 1: Um too, I guess sharing the proceeds since Santa Anna
- 2:33Speaker 1: introduced him introduced a chickle to him. But chickle is
- 2:38Speaker 1: you know, it's the gum base Yeah cheek lay actually,
- 2:42Speaker 1: uh it was. It basically took gum into the nineteenth
- 2:46Speaker 1: century or the twenties century, now the twenty feet century.
- 2:49Speaker 1: So um. Thomas Adams actually didn't honor his contract, and
- 2:53Speaker 1: by this time Santa Anna, who was in exile and
- 2:56Speaker 1: um had lost a leg, was now left any listen
- 3:00Speaker 1: destitute New York thanks to Adams getting us penny listen
- 3:04Speaker 1: and legless penny listen legless. Yeah, not a good combination, um,
- 3:08Speaker 1: But long story short, Santa Anna introduced this component uh
- 3:13Speaker 1: that that that mothers everywhere have lied to their children
- 3:17Speaker 1: about not being digestible to gum. So, I mean, if
- 3:21Speaker 1: we have this base, if we have this uh, this
- 3:23Speaker 1: this item in question, what you know that can't be
- 3:26Speaker 1: broken down? You know? Why? Why doesn't it stick around? Well,
- 3:29Speaker 1: it's basically like anything else you put in your mouth,
- 3:31Speaker 1: josh uh. It goes down your esophagus and into your stomach,
- 3:35Speaker 1: and enzymes and acids kind of start bubbling up and
- 3:38Speaker 1: they break everything down. So far, so good. Yeah, And
- 3:40Speaker 1: then what can't be broken down there um gets broken
- 3:44Speaker 1: down in the intestines. Um, Your liver and pancreas kind
- 3:47Speaker 1: of help out the intestines there. And then what's left
- 3:51Speaker 1: after that is just the gun base, and that moves
- 3:54Speaker 1: into your colon and it's pretty much a one way
- 3:56Speaker 1: street from there. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to go
- 3:58Speaker 1: the other way because they could be very bad. And
- 4:01Speaker 1: actually there have been a couple of occasions that that
- 4:05Speaker 1: support from this this old wives tale at gum stays
- 4:08Speaker 1: in you for seven years. The poor kid as we
- 4:10Speaker 1: call him, we yeah, we've been calling him around the
- 4:12Speaker 1: office poor kid, right uh and and quite rightly. Poor
- 4:15Speaker 1: Kid was a four year old who had suffered intense
- 4:20Speaker 1: constipation for half of his life, two years, and it's
- 4:24Speaker 1: no wonder why No, Actually, his parents, it turns out,
- 4:27Speaker 1: had been um potty training him and any time he
- 4:30Speaker 1: was successful, they gave him a piece of gum. And
- 4:32Speaker 1: apparently this kid was really successful. He was good on
- 4:35Speaker 1: the potty, Yeah he was. He was getting like five
- 4:37Speaker 1: to seven pieces of gum a day and swallowing all
- 4:39Speaker 1: of them. So I guess his parents were really focused
- 4:41Speaker 1: on the potty training and not the fact that he
- 4:43Speaker 1: wasn't spinning this gum out. And you know what was
- 4:46Speaker 1: the result, Well, well, poor kids taken to the doctor.
- 4:48Speaker 1: The doctors finally, I guess, crack them open and they
- 4:51Speaker 1: find um, which is, I guess described by the finest
- 4:55Speaker 1: assemblage of words I've ever seen in my entire life,
- 4:57Speaker 1: a taffy like trail of fecal material real and poor kid, yeah,
- 5:02Speaker 1: ter right. So well, the good news is that they
- 5:04Speaker 1: were able to suction all this out of his rectum
- 5:07Speaker 1: and send him along his merry way, which I imagine
- 5:09Speaker 1: was a life changing experience for poor kiddy. He does
- 5:12Speaker 1: stand as a cautionary tale, though, although he didn't crack
- 5:15Speaker 1: the seven year mark, he was only four when this
- 5:16Speaker 1: procedure was done, which is, I guess a good thing
- 5:20Speaker 1: for everybody, right, and the world will never know. It's
- 5:22Speaker 1: like a tipsy pop right, how many lives? If you
- 5:25Speaker 1: want to know any more gross stuff about gum and
- 5:27Speaker 1: digestion get rida? Does gum really stay in you? For
- 5:30Speaker 1: seven years on how stuff works dot com. For more
- 5:34Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
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