Not to burst your perfectly blown bubble, but it turns out that chewing gum may be flooding your mouth with microplastics. As detailed in a pilot study which is awaiting peer-review, a team of researchers found that chomping down on just one stick of the rubbery candy releases up to thousands of microplastic shards into your saliva.

A new study found that both natural and synthetic gum shed microplastics, with each piece of gum producing about 100 pieces of microplastics.

Chewing gum can secrete tiny plastic particles into saliva and bloodstreams, scientists in the US and China say, pointing to the latest source of microplastics in the human body. In a paper presented at the American Chemical Society (ACS) spring meeting on March 25,