Kelsey Kinney: Okay, so gum is an interesting one. Because really there’s kind of a lot of conflicting research on whether chewing gum is good or bad, for weight loss, particularly. So personally, I’m a little bit conflicted at this point as to whether or not it’s actually useful for that. But the good news, I guess, to make this a little bit easier for us to have a strong opinion about, is that at least from what I’ve seen, the effect of artificial sweeteners that are used in chewing gum a lot of the time, their effect on the microbiome and the metabolic system, there’s a lot that I’ve seen that makes me think it’s not a great thing to be consuming all the time.
So if someone is chewing gum constantly throughout the day, they’re getting a lot of exposure to those artificial sweeteners. That’s something that I, at this point from what I’ve seen, do not think is necessarily a healthy choice. Especially if there’s gut issues already present, there’s metabolic issues already present, that wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice or for sure, not my recommendation to help with those issues. So to me, there’s enough that I’ve seen that would make me say if I had somebody chewing a lot of gum, that we should quit that.
Now, I haven’t had to deal with this in private practice yet, personally. I haven’t had somebody who’s chewing gum a ton, enough that I would consider it to be a major problem, but I think if I did have to deal with this with someone, I would treat them kind of as a constant snacker. Make sure that they’re eating enough at their meals that they’re consuming, their blood sugar regulation is really good, and just make sure they’re not getting to that point of just feeling like snacky. Because I think that’s a big reason why people tend to go for gum anyway. They’re like, “I just want to have, I want to chew on something, basically.” Most people don’t snack when they’re particularly hungry, anyway. It’s just like that oral fixation piece of it.
So I think I would treat this kind of similarly. And in combination with those things that I mentioned, so blood sugar management, eating enough at meal time so that they’re actually full, I would also probably use a good bit of stress management practices. So meditation, deep breathing, even just like going for a walk a couple times a day. Just like getting up and doing something or doing a stress management practice, I think, would go a long way to help reduce the need for that oral fixation too.
So, again, I personally haven’t had to deal with it in private practice yet, but I think that is how I would go about it. And just to distill this down into the main takeaway here, I would say for weight loss there’s some conflicting research on chewing gum, but there’s a lot of, at least from what I’ve seen, a lot of research about the impact of the artificial sugars in chewing gum on gastrointestinal microbial balance and metabolic system. So I am not a huge fan, and I would recommend that my patients probably take that out if they were consistently chewing gum every single day.