Does chewing gum help with weight loss?

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Robte71

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I stopped smoking roughly 3 years back. These days I use sugar-free gum. I found an article that caught my attention.




The effect of gum chewing on blood GLP-1 concentration in fasted, healthy, non-obese men - PMC



To look into the neural pathways that control glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) release, we tested how chewing affects blood GLP-1 levels by asking volunteers to chew gum without sugar. Following a 12 h fast, 12 ...

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pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
That's fascinating! For me, gum has always been a way to satisfy the mental urge to snack when actual hunger isn't there. Years back, a naturopath explained to me that the act of chewing tricks the brain and gut into thinking additional food is coming, which ramps up digestion.
 
Looking at those graphs, the upside seems minimal to me. Since my teenage years I went through no less than a pack daily (Trident original) — I was devoted to gum. These days I've swapped it out for flavored toothpicks, after looking into mannitol and the severe responses some people develop from using it long term.
 
Based on the research, sugar-free gum might slightly increase feelings of fullness and support keeping fasting GLP-1 levels steady, which is notable. That said, the study is quite small, and the impact doesn’t match that of a GLP-1 agonist, nor is it likely to lead to significant weight loss by itself.

There’s also this section worth highlighting:

“In 2012, scholars in the United States make 102 overweight or obese adult volunteers to chew gum 90 min per day for 8 weeks, and the result shows that this did not facilitate weight loss in these overweight and obese adults.”

So the authors themselves admit that gum chewing won’t work wonders.

On a personal note, I believe gum can be useful for avoiding unconscious snacking. I definitely relied on it for that in the 80s and 90s, back when it was the only affordable weight loss trick I had.
 
I've always thought it was curious that merely seeing food is said to trigger insulin and GLP-1 release. If that were all it took, we could all be thin by sticking a picture of a cheeseburger to the inside of our sunglasses.
 
This study could have been worth reading, but its bias ruins it.

Under methods, it states: “12 subjects were given sugarless gum.”

Nothing tells us what was in that gum: are there sweeteners, and which ones if so? It’s already established that polyols, aspartame, or sucralose affect the microbiome, and the microbiome can then affect particular hormonal signals (the mechanism, however, is not fully understood).

With only 12 people, presenting data at a 0.05 confidence interval isn’t honest. Sure, the machine will always spit out a result once you feed it the data, but the uncertainty sits around 30%.

Other statistical approaches are needed, Bayesian methods among them. Even with those, you can’t count on seeing anything, since uncertainty remains high. All you can get is a hint about whether pursuing this line is worthwhile. (Decades back, Latin squares were used—those were somewhat enjoyable 🙂
 
I've said this in comments elsewhere, over on social media. Down 140 pounds — but now I'm spending $60 a month on sugarless Juicy Fruit.
 
toadking said:

Looking at those graphs, the upside seems minimal to me. Since my teenage years I went through no less than a pack daily (Trident original) — I was devoted to gum. These days I've swapped it out for flavored toothpicks, after looking into mannitol and the severe responses some people develop from using it long term.
Click to expand...
After dropping 140 pounds, I go through $60 worth of Sugarless Juicy Fruit every month. I had no idea toothpicks came in flavors other than mint or cinnamon
 
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