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What happens if you swallow gum?

health.clevelandclinic.org

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Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#21

Post by brij0102 »

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.

But now you have peanut butter hair!

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#22

Post by furyofantares »

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.

What I did when I was a kid was swallow every gumball in a carton of gumballs to prove that they couldn't possibly be staying in my stomach for 7 years because nothing else would be getting through.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#23

Post by gmfawcett »

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.

Yes, although the New York Public Library has had you covered since the 1960's: https://qz.com/732086/the-new-york-public-librarys-little-kn...

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#24

Post by xattt »

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.

My co-workers once told me their experience about caring for an older epileptic patient. Many patients with epilepsy continue to take the same meds for decades if the meds work for them, which means you’ll encounter some ancient drugs.

This patient was ordered chloral hydrate, which is given in liquid form. One of the younger nurses went to give them med in a styrofoam cup, only be shocked that the cup had melted.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#25

Post by throwway120385 »

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.

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.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#26

Post by lanstin »

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.

I have had a low grade curiosity about this since the 1970s, so nice to have it definitively answered (tho I'm a bit sad gum is just plastic now). Next up: coke and Mentos, and swallowing sunflower seeds (although really this article answered that one implicitly).

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#27

Post by lanstin »

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.

I actually had the opportunity to try the peanut butter to remove gum from hair once, but my child just cut it out before I could get ready. The beginning of the mullet haircut season. (I was SAHD but with the self-cut hair, my wife (at the time) insisted on an immediate emergency hair cut at some fancy salon place, and the mullet was determined to be the only choice available. The gum was stuck about 2 inches above the bangs, so shortening the bangs to that length was a substantial committment). Anyways, I digress.

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#28

Post by lanstin »

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…

Given the prompt "Why does swallowing gum result in the gum staying in your body for 7 years?" Claude explains that that story is a myth, so maybe search is dead but GenAI isn't totally useless. Wikipedia also comments on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum#Choking_and_excret...

Re: What happens if you swallow gum?

#30

Post by m463 »

brij0102 wrote: post #21
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.

But now you have peanut butter hair!

you can get that out with jelly and bread.
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