Visiting US President Barack Obama was captured live on TV watching the Indian Republic Day and taking out chewing gum from his mouth much to the chagrin of the media but chewing gum can enhance oral health by removing 100 million bacteria from your mouth in just 10 minutes, says a new study.
Researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands said chewing gum traps and removes bacteria from the oral cavity region and is helpful for cigarette smokers in particular. Obama has reportedly stopped smoking.
The study conducted on 5 biomedical engineering students to chew two different types of spearmint gum from 30 seconds to 10 minutes and later were asked to spit it into a cup with sterile water for analysis.
The gum was found to have consisted of about 100 million bacteria on each and the number increased exponentially with the increase in time of chewing. But longer chewing can only attach fewer bateria as it loses its adhesiveness, said researchers.
“Trapped bacteria were clearly visualised in chewed gum using scanning-electron-microscopy,” researchers said in their paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Chewing gum has been found to have equalled the toothbrush without paste that can clean around 100 million colony-forming units (CFUs).
“Chewing gum however, does not necessarily remove bacteria from the same sites of the dentition as does brushing or flossing, therefore its results may be noticeable on a more long-term than those of brushing or flossing,” researchers said.
