Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happens if you swallow gum?

health.clevelandclinic.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#31

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

m463 wrote: post #18
smusamashah wrote: post #13

Try eating a chocolate while chewing bubble gum. The gum will soon dissolve / break into tiny threads/pieces. It might be rough experience and you may feel like spitting it out. Happened to me by accident as a kid and I remember asking some cousins to do the same and they experienced the same thing. Unless gums are made differently, it should still work.

Mixing peanut butter and gum. As a matter of fact, it is a perfect solution for getting out gum stuck in your hair. It just dissolves. Another unexpected solvent I found was when I was a teenager working on a gasoline engine. Don't pour gasoline in a styrofoam cup. The gas went right through the cup, like it wasn't even there. Ate a hole anywhere it touched.

Gasoline's abilities as a solvent led to it being used as a dry cleaning agent at one time.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#32

Post by dredmorbius »

serf wrote: post #19
smusamashah wrote: post #13

Try eating a chocolate while chewing bubble gum. The gum will soon dissolve / break into tiny threads/pieces. It might be rough experience and you may feel like spitting it out. Happened to me by accident as a kid and I remember asking some cousins to do the same and they experienced the same thing. Unless gums are made differently, it should still work.

you can sorta-kinda do that with anything with a high fat content. the fat interacts with the gum base and emulsifiers. the fat also coats the components in a way that reduces likelihood of re-amalgamation.

Right, any oil and gum.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#34

Post by dylan604 »

mkmk wrote: post #3

I'm not sure why, but this makes me think of the time before ubiquitous internet, when the answers to questions like this one were much harder to come by.

Before the internet, everyone knew that if you swallowed a watermelon seed that it would grow in your belly. Ipsofacto, if you swallow gum, a gum tree would grow. It is known

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#35

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

JohnMakin wrote: post #4

It's always been amazing to me that in the post-internet, pre-enshittification era of the Information age that people could go around confidently spouting bullshit facts like "gum stays in your body for 7 years" when a few swipes of a thumb can tell anyone with an internet connection otherwise. Nowadays this doesn't hold as true, because search results / LLM's tend to give you the information it thinks that you want…

There are vast hundreds of millions to billions of people who don't watch the news and don't read books, get their information from social media and rumors, and don't know about authoritative primary sources or critical thinking.

After all, what else would explain populist authoritarians being so wildly popular almost globally at this time?

And maybe we need a social media platform that forbids plaintext and only allows fixed patterns of statements backed by citations from reputable sources only? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#36

Post by dylan604 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #25
m463 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mixing peanut butter and gum. As a matter of fact, it is a perfect solution for getting out gum stuck in your hair. It just dissolves. Another unexpected solvent I found was when I was a teenager working on a gasoline engine. Don't pour gasoline in a styrofoam cup. The gas went right through the cup, like it wasn't even there. Ate a hole anywhere it touched.

Acetone works great too. It's very useful for getting rid of styrofoam from packing because you can reduce several cubic feet of styrofoam to a brick 1/100th the size and then throw that away instead.

And who doesn't like a room filled with that fragrance?

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#38

Post by reaperman »

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #35
JohnMakin wrote: post #4

It's always been amazing to me that in the post-internet, pre-enshittification era of the Information age that people could go around confidently spouting bullshit facts like "gum stays in your body for 7 years" when a few swipes of a thumb can tell anyone with an internet connection otherwise. Nowadays this doesn't hold as true, because search results / LLM's tend to give you the information it thinks that you want…

There are vast hundreds of millions to billions of people who don't watch the news and don't read books, get their information from social media and rumors, and don't know about authoritative primary sources or critical thinking. After all, what else would explain populist authoritarians being so wildly popular almost globally at this time? And maybe we need a social media platform that forbids plaintext and only all…

About 750 million people are entirely illiterate as well (in any language). I think the actual number may be higher because I’ve worked with a surprising number of them across global oilfields.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#40

Post by 13of40 »

dylan604 wrote: post #34
mkmk wrote: post #3

I'm not sure why, but this makes me think of the time before ubiquitous internet, when the answers to questions like this one were much harder to come by.

Before the internet, everyone knew that if you swallowed a watermelon seed that it would grow in your belly. Ipsofacto, if you swallow gum, a gum tree would grow. It is known

Before the internet everything happened in periods of seven years. All the cells in your body would be replaced, your luck would recover from a broken mirror, the bankers would discharge your debt, and missing people would finally be declared dead. It was a much more elegant system than we have today.

Edit: And of course, the seven year itch.

Post reply on HN