Chewing gum: great for fresh breath, fun for blowing bubbles, and… oh yeah… apparently a solid source of microplastics. Scientists just discovered that every stick you chew releases hundreds to thousands of tiny plastic particles straight into your saliva. And before you get smug about your “natural” gum, turns out, it’s just as bad.

At the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting, researchers shared their study on ten different gum brands—five synthetic, five natural. Their findings? The moment you start chewing, microplastics start breaking free. In fact, 94% of them are released within the first eight minutes. Some sticks let loose up to 600 microplastics per gram, meaning frequent gum-chewers could be swallowing around 30,000 microplastics per year. Delicious.

Now, scientists aren’t totally sure how bad this is for you (yet), but given that microplastics have already been found in human blood, testicles, and even brains… it’s probably not great. Previous research has also linked microplastics to potential health risks, so adding them to your gum habit isn’t exactly a selling point.

And don’t think you’re off the hook once you spit it out—gum is still full of plastic, which means it sticks around (literally) in the environment. So maybe rethink tossing it on the sidewalk… or into a lake, river, or ocean.

The takeaway? While we wait for more research, just know that every time you chew gum, you might be giving your digestive system an unexpected dose of “chewy” plastic. Fresh breath has never been so questionable.

Photo: Public Domain.