Chewing gum is stepped on, swallowed and stuck in the hair of unsuspecting classmates. Some find gum chewing relieves stress or helps to keep them from overeating. Others just think it's an unpleasant habit. Where did chewing gum come from in the first place?
Tree resin, or sap, traditionally formed the base for chewing gums. The ancient Greeks chewed mastiche, a gum made from the resin of the mastiche tree.
Later, the Maya Indians of Mexico chewed chicle, a rubbery resin from the sapodilla tree. The colonists of New England adopted the Indian habit of chewing hardened spruce sap.
The popularity of spruce gum waned with the introduction of a new chewing gum made of sweetened paraffin wax. Licorice Lulu, Four-in-Hand, Sugar Cream, White Mountain and Biggest and Best were some of the paraffin wax gums peddled in the 1800s.
The forerunner of modern chewing gum emerged in the 1860s. One story claims that Santa Anna, the Mexican general who led the attack on the Alamo, left a chunk of chicle in the desk drawer of an office in Staten Island, New York.
Thomas Adams Sr. found the chicle and tried to make it into rubber first, and then an adhesive for false teeth. Failing at both attempts, he finally boiled down and rolled the chicle flat, creating the base for the tastiest chewing gum to that time. (Synthetics have now replaced chicle as a gum base.)
Bubble gum was first produced in 1906, but was not perfected and marketed until 1928.
Sugarless gum was first marketed in the mid-1960s. Chewing sugarless gum directly after eating may lower the incidence of tooth decay by stimulating the production of saliva, according to a report in the Journal of the American Dental Association. Xylitol, a nonfermentable sugar alcohol popular in European gums, may even protect the teeth.
Perhaps someone will invent no-stick, hair-proof gum that will launch yet another decade of the gum chewing habit!
- By Anne Douglas
Taken from Youth 90 magazine
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