A group of students in Valencia, Spain, came up with an idea for chewing gum that might help your body flush out microplastics. I know, this sounds weird, but is a true fact.
They call it MicroGum and help your body deal with the plastics you’ve already swallowed without knowing it. it’s kind of brilliant in its simplicity. You chew the gum. The gum releases enzymes. Then, your body just gets rid of it.
That’s the pitch. And it didn’t come from a lab run by a billion-dollar company. It came from five students at the Universidad de Valencia, working on a project for a program called Motivem that encourages students to solve real-world problems. They weren’t all from the same field, either: medicine, pharmacy, psychology, math, and physics. A strange but perfect mix.
“We saw that the solutions that exist now for this problem are water filters and purifiers,” said Aitana Ramos, the medical student on the team, in an interview with Agencia EFE.
“But there was nothing for food… and we started to think of something more innovative that would eliminate microplastics from the inside.”
It does more than freshen your breath, but how?
Right now, MicroGum is just a prototype. An idea. But here’s the logic: you’re already eating and drinking microplastics… Tiny fragments of packaging, textiles, and who-knows-what else. They show up in salt, bottled water, even in meat and vegetables. Once they’re in you, there’s not much you can do.
So what if there were a way to help your body break them down and get rid of them? That’s the question this student are answering with chewing gum!
The enzymes in MicroGum (called PETase and metASA) break down PET plastic — the kind found in food packaging — inside your digestive system. Then, your body just gets rid of it.
The team figured if those enzymes could survive in a human-friendly form, maybe they could do the same thing inside us. “It degrades it into substances that, combined with the other enzyme, allow us not to accumulate them in the body,” Aitana explained. “And we excrete them… naturally.”
It’s early. No one knows yet how the enzymes will behave in the body, or if they’ll actually work as intended. There’s testing to do. Safety studies. Time. Still, the idea is unusually clear. Simple, even.
It could also be a chewable tablet, but they stuck with gum. Why? Because gum is normal. It doesn’t feel like medicine. It’s easy to use and easy to forget you’re even using it.
It’s not a product… Yet
This isn’t going to be on store shelves next month. The students are upfront about that. Right now, MicroGum is a promising idea that needs a lot more research.
“We have the idea,” Aitana said, “and we need training and research to be able to carry it out.”
They’re hoping to collaborate with other departments at the Universidad de Valencia, maybe even outside labs. Whatever it takes to see if this little gum can actually do what they think it can.
And yeah, it might not work. But even if it doesn’t, it’s still the kind of idea that feels worth trying.
Big problem, small chewable idea.
There’s something really human about this project. It doesn’t try to fix the whole problem of plastic pollution. It just asks: what can we do right now with the tools we have?
A gum that helps clean out something your body never asked to swallow in the first place? That’s strange. That’s simple. That’s kind of awesome.
Well it came from five students in Valencia, sitting around thinking about something that most people would rather ignore.