Gum chewing to lose weight?

Interesting! Chewing gum always seems to fill that psychological need for a snack even when I'm not actually hungry. Years back my naturopath mentioned that chewing tells the brain and gut to speed up digestion because it tricks them into expecting more food coming down.

Looking at the graphs I don't see much benefit. I used to chew gum religiously, at least a pack a day of the original Trident kind, ever since I was a teenager. Lately I've switched the habit to flavored toothpicks after looking into mannitol and how some people get strong reactions to it with long-term use.

The study indicates that sugar-free gum might give a slight increase in fullness and help keep fasting GLP-1 levels steady, which is noteworthy. Still it's a very small study and the effect isn't like a GLP-1 agonist or likely to cause real weight loss by itself. The authors also point out that in 2012 a U.S. trial had 102 overweight or obese adults chew gum 90 minutes a day for eight weeks and found no weight loss. So even they admit gum won't work miracles. I do think gums can stop mindless eating though. I used them that way back in the 80s and 90s when it was the only affordable trick I had.

I always found it interesting that just looking at food is supposed to trigger insulin and GLP-1 production. We'd all be thin if we simply taped a picture of a cheeseburger inside our sunglasses.

This study might have been worth something if it weren't so biased. The methods say twelve subjects were given sugarless gum but give no details on what the gum actually contains or which sweeteners are in it. We already know polyols, aspartame or sucralose can affect the microbiome and thereby certain hormonal signals, though that link isn't fully worked out. With only twelve people you can't really claim results at a 0.05 confidence level. The uncertainty stays around 30 percent even if the numbers look significant. Other tools like Bayesian methods would be better, or older approaches like Latin squares that were sometimes useful.

Earlier I brought this up in replies somewhere online. After dropping one hundred forty pounds I ended up hooked on a sugar free gum routine.

I can't believe this hasn't come up before. Research indicates most types of gum, including the organic varieties, contain tiny plastic bits. It turns out that when you chew it, those particles end up in your mouth fluids. People who do this often might swallow a huge number of them over twelve months, based on an initial investigation.