CHEW ON THIS

You may have heard your dental hygienist tell you to brush and floss more, but what about chewing more gum?

In a study published in PLOS One, researchers found that chewing gum may remove as much bacteria as brushing without toothpaste or flossing. The study was funded by Wrigley……ok, but it’s still interesting.

“This study was initiated as a method development study to determine the number of bacteria that are trapped in a piece of sugar-free gum,” said one of the authors. “According to our knowledge, this is the first time that an estimate of the number of bacteria trapped in a piece of chewed gum is determined.”

For their research, Wessel and colleagues included five healthy volunteers from the department of biomedical engineering and asked them to chew two types of commercially available sugar-free chewing gums for varying amounts of time up to 10 minutes.

“We discuss [in the study] that by targeting different areas in the mouth, sugar-free chewing gum removes comparable amounts of bacteria to those removed by flossing and a clean toothbrush without toothpaste,” Wessel said. “This was done for perspective only and not meant to compare effectiveness of both techniques.”

The researchers used numerous methods to quantify and qualify numbers of oral bacteria trapped in chewed gum. What they concluded was that daily gum chewing reduces the bacterial load in the oral cavity over time.

The maximum bacteria were trapped during the initial chewing period, after which a slow decrease over time up to 10 minutes was observed. This decline was seen with both methods regardless of the type of gum involved.

While the initial gum bases are most adhesive to oral bacteria, continued chewing changes the structure of the gum and decreases the hardness because of salivary uptake and release of water-soluble components, the study authors noted.

“This presumably affects the adhesion of bacteria to the gum, causing a release of initially trapped, more weakly adhering bacteria from the gum,” they wrote.

They reported that, assuming a volume of saliva of around 1 ml, their results indicate that chewing one piece of gum removes around 10% of the oral microbial load in saliva. They compared this to use of a new, clean toothbrush without any toothpaste, and found that it removed about the same amount of bacteria as the gum chewing. The mechanical action of floss removes a comparable number of bacteria, as established in an unpublished pilot study.

The authors emphasized that brushing and flossing remain more effective in reaching many areas in the mouth, and that sugar-free chewing gum should not be seen as a replacement, but as an addition to both techniques. The study findings may promote the development of gum that selectively removes specific disease-related bacteria from the human oral cavity, for instance by using porous type calcium carbonate, the authors noted.

Chew in moderation.

Dr. St. Clair maintains a private dental practice in Rowley and Newburyport dedicated to health-centered family dentistry. If there are certain topics you would like to see written about or questions you have please email them to him at jpstclair@stclairdmd.com. You can view all previously written columns at www.jpeterstclairdentistry.com/blog.