I’ve chewed gum pretty much my entire life.

I love gum.

It keeps my mouth busy, and if I’m sitting at my computer completely hyper-focused on something — like I am while writing this — there’s a pretty good chance I’m chewing spruce gum.

But after getting used to chewing real tree resin, commercial gum feels completely different to me now.

Soft. Squishy. Weirdly smooth. I can’t do it anymore.

And that got me interested in something I honestly never thought much about during all those years of chewing gum:

What actually makes gum… gum?

Turn over a package and you’ll usually find two words somewhere in the ingredients:

gum base.

Those two words hide a surprisingly complicated story.

What Is Gum Base?

Gum base is the part of chewing gum that gives it its chew.

The sweeteners and flavours eventually dissolve, but the base remains.

And “gum base” isn’t necessarily one ingredient. It’s a formulation that can contain combinations of:

• elastomers
• resins
• waxes
• emulsifiers
• softeners or plasticizers
• fillers

Different manufacturers develop different formulations depending on how soft, stretchy, firm or long-lasting they want their gum to be.

That’s why two completely different products can both simply say “gum base.”

Is Gum Base Plastic?

This is where things get interesting.

Some conventional gum bases use synthetic polymers to produce their familiar elastic texture. Technical descriptions of gum base include materials such as polyethylene, polyvinyl acetate and polyisobutylene among the substances that can be used in formulations.

That doesn’t mean eating an approved commercial gum is the same thing as grabbing a random piece of plastic and chewing it.

But some synthetic gum-base ingredients are polymers that are also used in plastic applications.

And recently researchers asked another question:

Does chewing gum actually release microplastics?

So this research isn’t proof that one particular type of gum is harmful or another is safe.

It does, however, give people another reason to start asking a question that very few of us asked twenty years ago:

What exactly am I chewing?

And Then There’s What Happens After You Spit It Out

There’s another side to gum that has nothing to do with what happens inside your mouth.

Where does it go afterward?

We’ve all seen it.

Under school desks. Stuck underneath restaurant tables. Ground into sidewalks. Thrown into parking lots. Stuck to benches.

Anyone who went to school in the ’80s, ’90s or early 2000s probably remembers reaching underneath a desk at least once and discovering somebody else’s ancient gum.

Absolutely disgusting.

And gum containing persistent synthetic polymers doesn’t simply disappear because someone spit it onto the pavement.

It becomes litter.

That’s an aspect of chewing gum we rarely think about when we’re standing at the checkout buying a pack.

What About Gum and Your Teeth?

This part is more complicated than “gum is bad for your teeth.”

Because that isn’t actually true across the board.

Traditional sugar-containing gums can provide fermentable sugars that oral bacteria can turn into acids. Frequent exposure to those acids contributes to the conditions that cause tooth decay.

But sugar-free gum is a completely different story.

Chewing stimulates saliva. Saliva helps clear food and sugars from the mouth and helps buffer acids.

Research reviews have found evidence that sugar-free chewing gum can reduce dental caries, with saliva stimulation appearing to be an important part of that effect. Other reviews have found evidence of reductions in plaque quantity and in levels of Streptococcus mutans, a bacterium associated with dental caries, although the results vary between studies.

Humans Were Chewing Long Before Modern Gum Base

Here’s the part I find fascinating.

We didn’t invent chewing gum in a factory.

Humans have chewed natural materials for thousands of years.

Depending on where people lived, they chewed things such as:

• chicle
• mastic
• birch-derived materials
• spruce resin
• other natural plant gums and resins

Eventually chewing gum became an industry.

Natural materials such as spruce resin and later chicle entered commercial production, and over time manufacturers developed increasingly consistent gum bases using combinations of natural and synthetic ingredients.

And I understand why.

Natural resin can be temperamental.

Temperature matters. The tree matters. The age of the resin matters. One batch doesn’t necessarily behave exactly like another.

Industrial manufacturing wants the opposite.

Consistency.

That’s Also Why I Like Spruce Gum

Spruce gum takes the whole idea of chewing gum back toward where it began.

Tree resin.

At Alberta Wildcraft, we personally wild-harvest the resin used in our gum from Canadian forests and prepare it ourselves in Alberta.

Our current gum is made primarily from spruce resin with a small amount of pine resin to create the chewing texture we’re after.

No synthetic gum base.

No artificial sweeteners.

No flavour pretending the resin is something it isn’t.

It tastes like a tree.

And I mean that literally.

It’s resinous, forest-like, sometimes smoky, sometimes sharp, and the exact character changes slightly because trees don’t manufacture themselves to a specification sheet.

Spruce Gum Isn’t Commercial Gum Without the Ingredients

This is probably the biggest misconception.

Someone tries spruce gum expecting regular gum minus the sugar.

That’s not what it is.

Real resin gum behaves differently. The first chew can be firmer. The flavour isn’t sweet. The texture changes as the resin warms. Natural variation exists between batches.

And once you’ve become accustomed to it, commercial gum can feel really strange.

Or, in my case:

Slug.

Sorry. That’s permanently what my brain thinks now.

So What’s Actually in the Gum You’re Chewing?

That’s ultimately why I think this subject matters.

Not because everyone needs to throw away their commercial gum tomorrow.

I chewed the stuff for most of my life.

But consumers are asking much better questions about their food than we used to.

What creates this texture? What does “gum base” mean? Is the base natural or synthetic? Does it contain sugar? What happens to it after I throw it away? And what did humans chew before we learned how to manufacture modern gum?

Those questions lead somewhere fascinating.

Because eventually, if you follow chewing gum far enough backward, you end up outside.

At a tree.

And in northern forests, one of those trees was spruce.

That’s the rabbit hole we’ve spent years exploring.