Does Swallowed Gum Stay in Your Stomach for Seven Years?

If you type "i swallowed gum" into Google, two of the ways it offers to finish the sentence are "am i gonna die" and "will i be ok." If you type "does gum stay in your stomach," it suggests "for 7 years," "forever," and, further down, "for 7 days."

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Swallowed gum doesn't stay in your stomach for seven years, or for anything close to that. Your body can't digest it, but it moves through you like other things you can't digest and comes out in your poop. The only cases where gum has stayed put involved someone swallowing a lot of it, over and over, or swallowing it together with things like coins and seed shells.

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Why your body can't break gum down

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Gum is two things mixed together: the sweeteners and flavorings, which your body can absorb (the sweeteners in sugar-free gum are their own story), and the gum base, the rubbery part you're actually chewing. KidsHealth (the teen health site run by Nemours, a US children's health system) says that "the human body cannot digest the gum base."

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The FDA (the US agency that regulates food additives) calls gum base a "nonnutritive masticatory substance," which is a legal way of saying that it's something you chew that has no nutrition in it. Its list of allowed ingredients includes chicle (a natural gum from a Central American tree), polyethylene, polyvinyl acetate, and butyl rubber, which Scientific American points out "also finds use in the manufacture of inner tubes." Snopes (the fact-checking site) describes the mix as one that "resists the body's efforts to break it down."

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What happens to it instead

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Between meals, a wave of squeezing called the migrating motor complex travels from your stomach to the end of your small intestine, and according to StatPearls (a medical reference doctors use), it happens "at 1.5- to 2-hour intervals." During the strongest part of the wave, the pylorus (the valve at the bottom of your stomach) stays open, "allowing undigested food to move into the small intestine."

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Dr. David Milov, a pediatric gastroenterologist (a doctor who specializes in kids' digestive systems) at Nemours Children's Clinic in Orlando, told Scientific American that gum "probably passes through slower than most foodstuffs, but eventually the normal housekeeping waves in the digestive tract will sort of push it through, and it will come out pretty unmolested."

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Cleveland Clinic lists raw seeds, corn kernels, and bell pepper skins as other foods that "typically pass through your digestive system relatively untouched," and gum rides along with them. In a 1987 study of 73 healthy people who swallowed small plastic markers that show up on an X-ray, the markers took an average of 35 hours just to cross the colon (the last stretch of your intestines), on top of the time spent in the stomach and small intestine.

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If the seven-year story were true, Milov said, "every single person who ever swallowed gum within the last seven years would have evidence of the gum in the digestive tract," and colonoscopies and capsule endoscopies (a camera you swallow like a pill) don't show that. "On occasion we'll see a piece of swallowed gum," he said, "but usually it's not something that's any more than a week old." The guideline from the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (the professional group for doctors who do scopes) says that once a swallowed object reaches the stomach, "most objects pass in 4 to 6 days." That guideline is about swallowed objects in general, and it never mentions gum.

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Where "seven years" came from

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Nobody knows. Scientific American calls the idea "decades-old" and "of unknown origin but almost universal renown," and McGill University's Office for Science and Society (a Canadian university group that fact-checks science claims) says that its origins "are likely lost to history." None of them explains why it's seven and not some other number.

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Snopes guessed that it grew out of "genuine confusion" over the word "indigestible," which people took to mean that gum could "lurk in the digestive system year after year." Kids also get told not to swallow gum, and Snopes figured that the imagination fills in a reason, since the plain one (that gum isn't food) "lacks an appropriate sense of mystery."

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When gum does get stuck

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In 1998, Milov and three colleagues published a report in Pediatrics on three children with gum blockages. As Scientific American describes the paper, two of them had been given gum as a reward for good behavior and regularly swallowed it, and in both, the gum "snowballed into a substantial 'taffylike' mass that required extraction." The third was a girl a year and a half old with four coins stuck in her esophagus (the tube from your throat to your stomach), "fused into a single blob by a wad of chewing gum." Milov also described a separate patient who swallowed sunflower seeds with the shells on, which ended up "congealed around gum" in a mass he compared to a porcupine.

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Gum did stay inside one adult for a long time, in a 2020 report in the ACG Case Reports Journal. A 53-year-old woman getting a colonoscopy for an unrelated problem had "numerous foreign bodies" in her colon, which turned out to be nicotine gum. She'd been swallowing about 25 pieces a day for three years. The doctors estimated that there were at least 30 pieces in the first section of her colon. Most flushed right off, but the pieces wedged into diverticula (small pouches in the colon wall) "were not able to be readily flushed out and were left in place." The authors wrote that there were "only 3 documented cases in adult patients" of gum found this way, and that there was "no known causality between ingesting chewing gum and disease."

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KidsHealth says that the rare blockages come from "swallowing a large mass of gum, or many small pieces of gum over a short period of time," and that they're "more likely to happen when gum is swallowed along with other indigestible things (like sunflower seed shells)." Mayo Clinic adds that blockages in children have happened when large amounts of gum were "combined with constipation." A 2012 review of bezoars (a doctor's word for a clump of undigested material stuck in the gut) lists the things that raise the risk: having part of the stomach removed, diabetes that has slowed down how the stomach empties, and "other systemic illnesses that may affect GI motility" (anything that affects how well your gut moves things along).

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Cleveland Clinic's article on swallowed gum, which quotes its dietitian Beth Czerwony throughout, sets the danger line much lower than the case reports do: "one piece a day for a week, or a mega-wad consisting of four pieces of gum at a time."

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If you just swallowed a piece

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You don't need to do anything. Mayo Clinic says gum "generally isn't harmful if swallowed," and Cleveland Clinic says that after one piece, "there's really no need to even keep an eye on your poop." Czerwony still says to spit it out, because "it's just not a food," and most of the cases above started with someone swallowing gum over and over.

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If you've swallowed a lot of gum and you start to feel off, Cleveland Clinic says to get medical care right away for signs of a blockage: belly pain, constipation, feeling extremely full or swollen, severe cramping, or throwing up.

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Sources

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