Chewing Gum For 10 Minutes Kills 100 Million Oral Bacteria

Chew this: just 10 minutes of gum can eliminate 100 million bacteria that have snuggled into your mouth. One chew is as good as flossing, according to hindustantimes.com.

Researchers at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, found that chewing gum can capture and eliminate bacteria from the mouth. The experiment asked five biomedical engineering students to chew two different standard types of spearmint gum for different ranges of time, from 30 seconds to 10 minutes.

The volunteers were asked to spit the gum into a cup of water, according to Medical Daily. With about 100 million bacteria on every piece of chewed-up gum, It was clear that the more you chew your gum, the more bacteria you can chew and remove.

After 30 seconds, the gum loses it adhesiveness, and is found to have captured less bacteria. "Trapped bacteria were clearly visualised in chewed gum using scanning-electron-microscopy," researchers said in the paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.

This is almost as good as using a new, clean toothbrush even without toothpaste to remove 100 million colony-forming units (CFUs) per brush. Hence, chewing gum would be just like the mechanical action of a toothbrush.

In one more experiment with three human volunteers that used 5 cm of floss wire, researchers found that "the mechanical action of floss wire removes a comparable number of bacteria from the oral cavity than does chewing of a single piece of gum."

"Chewing, however, does not necessarily remove bacteria from the same sites of the dentition as does brushing or flossing, therefore its results may be noticeable on a more long-term than those of brushing or flossing," researchers said.

This is not the first time that gum has been found to help. In 2008, a study found that the activity relieves anxiety, enhances alertness and reduces stress through multitasking.