truths and lies about the human body like if you were to swallow chewing gum would it really stay inside your body for extended periods of time well that's a question we get frequently and it came up again and again on our latest community post where we asked you guys to tell us about myths legends or old wives tells about the human body that you'd heard about while growing up and that list became amazing there's a lot of information that we're going to be able to use for future videos so we decided that we should do one truth and one lie because some of the things that people mentioned actually had some truth to them so today's topics we're going to cover what happens when you swallow chewing gum does it really stay in your body for over seven years like some of you have heard about and is it really more healthy to sleep on the left side of your body what's the truth what's the lie let's find out so let's start with my chewed up gum here and what would happen if this gum got down into the stomach here now to help us with this story it's going to be very helpful to understand what this stuff is truly made of now most gums have things like sugars flavoring artificial sweeteners and even dyes or colors so we can have you know pretty green well that's not a very pretty green color but green pinks reds and other colors that you've seen in gums but also they have something called the gum base if you were to look at the back of a wrapper or the ingredients of gum you would see gum base likely on those ingredients the problem with that is gum base is this umbrella term for multiple ingredients that make up that base that manufacturers don't like to list because apparently they don't want to share their trade secrets on what makes their gum more bubbly or gooey or whatever makes it so great and so they just say gum based and the fda has essentially allowed 40 plus different ingredients to be included under that umbrella of gum base so what really is the gum base generally the gum base includes things like elastomers waxes resins and even fillers and that is what gives gum its you know stretchy or gooey nature and i probably should have anticipated being sticky on my gloves but that's what we need to look at when we're talking about how well does our body break this stuff down now most of the time we start this story by unwrapping the gum and throwing it into our mouths or what we like to call the oral cavity in anatomy so you can see this sagittal cut here here's the tongue and here is the mouth or the oral cavity now some important points or features about this if we were to get to the lining of the cheek on the other side where i'm sticking the probe we would see ducts for glands like the parotid gland which is a salivary gland which would secrete saliva in here there's also secretions that would come from salivary glands from underneath the tongue and that saliva will help to moisturize and even soften whatever reading and even contains enzymes to start breaking things down now that saliva and those enzymes can definitely help with tasting the gum and the flavor but after a while we all know that gum loses its flavor and then it truly feels like you're just munching on rubber so that's alive in those enzymes don't break down the gum base at all now the other component of digestion in the oral cavity because if i didn't mention that already key point digestion starts in the mouth or the oral cavity is mechanical digestion where we chew and break things down now most food does break down a bit when we chew it but again gum we all know the whole point of it is to be able to chew it for prolonged periods of time and again doesn't break down that gum base now for most of us it stops in the oral cavity and we don't go any further with this story and we toss the gum in the garbage when we're done with it and most of us do it because we don't like munching on what feels like rubber some of us might be scared that we heard those stories about it could stay in your stomach for over seven years and so we're gonna be a little bit adventurous and pretend what if we did swallow that gum then it would move back to what we call the throat or the pharynx and then down to the food tube or the esophagus here now one thing i need to mention about gum before we go a little bit further into the stomach now we're used to and it's already happening now as you can see it's sticking to my gloves we're used to that when we take this out of our mouth we've seen it stuck under desks we've seen it on the ground and accidentally stepped on it it's impossible to get off your shoes and it seems like it stays in public wherever it was stuck for time and all eternity and so we may have this fear is that going to happen in our stomachs but let's take a step back here and just compare the environments i throw it outside of my mouth it's no longer coated in saliva or moisture and then it tends to dry out a little bit and get a little more firm that isn't going to happen when we swallow the gum because as it moves down the esophagus or the food tube here it's still going to be coated in mucus on its journey to the stomach so let me show you that as we go on to a different cadaver here so what you're looking at here is the windpipe or the trachea here not the food tube but just a reference here but here is the rest of the esophagus you saw the beginning of it again over here on the sagittal head dissection but we can see that tube coming down like so and the gum would move down that tube and eventually here's the bottom part of the esophagus get into the stomach now obviously as we know from the previous part of our story is the mastication or the chewing and the enzymes in the saliva didn't do anything to break down that gum base so now let's throw some different things at it and see how we do inside the stomach we've got hydrochloric acid and other enzymes that are going to try to break things down and typically does a pretty good job of breaking down a lot of the components of food but what we find out that even those additional enzymes and even the mixing nature of the stomach to mix things up and even the acid doesn't break it down and just for good measure to kind of prove the point hours ago prior to starting filming this video i mixed some hydrochloric acid and diluted it to the same concentration as stomach acid and then plopped some gum into that mixture to see what it would do or at least to prove that we know it's not going to break it down look at me go and even hours later we look at it again and you can see that it hasn't changed much at all so let's stop there and just kind of think okay so we're seeing that the gum is not breaking down in the mouth it's not breaking down in the stomach so now it's going to be stuck there forever it's never gonna get out of there i'm just gonna build up gum in there if i swallow more than one piece i'm dead right no that's not what's gonna happen here the stomach has an ability to mix and move and propel things along and eventually the gum will make it out of the stomach into the small intestine and to give you guys a little bit more context on that i've had patients typically their kids that swallow things they're not supposed to my latest patient was a two-year-old who thought he was a hero because he was really proud of himself when i saw him in the clinic and he swallowed a pennant from a necklace of his mother's she was not happy about it but she was also worried it was almost the size of a quarter and we did an x-ray and made sure sure enough it was down in the stomach now his mom was totally surprised what the next answer was because she's like okay well what do we do now and i said to her well check his diapers for the next couple days and make sure he passes it and she looked at me like i was a little bit crazy there but that's often what happens with certain foreign bodies as long as we don't have toxic or noxious things like batteries and other things a lot of times we just let the digestive tract propel it along and that's what happens with the gum that you swallowed or the piece that i mentioned that we could have swallowed comes in here to the small intestines and we let the small intestines take a crack at it because even in the beginning of the small intestines here there's going to be some secretions that come in from the pancreas and the liver and the gallbladder the pancreas is going to throw pancreatic enzymes to help digest things and again typically does pretty good with food and the liver and the gallbladder are going to dump in bile does the gum even care because gum has feelings about this no it doesn't at all the gum just does not get dissolved anymore by the bile or the pancreatic enzymes because again that gum base tends to be indigestible now take a minute and just kind of think about this for a second before we get worried about all this gum building up in us we eat indigestible material all the time we eat things that are like in our food you have broccoli you have vegetables things like that things that have high fiber fiber is indigestible and it just propels things along anything that ends up in the toilet is essentially indigestible material so the gum in essence is not going to behave any differently it's just going to move right along through the small intestine probably mixed with some other food here i'm just going to slide this over so you guys can see more here and we come up through the small intestine and it's going to zigzag all through the 20 feet of the small intestine not being absorbed because it's indigestible and essentially if it's not into if it's not digestible we can't bring it into the bloodstream and then eventually it'll make it to the colon and once we get into the colon and we've been in the colon well not we but the food necessarily because if we were in there that'd be a really bad environment because this is where essentially you create poop or we can be a little more professional and say feces or stool but again that's coming down and it would mix with that waste and eventually make it out of the human body now that'll take anywhere from two to three days for that to happen depending on what you've been eating and things like that and digestive rates and motility rates but again should have no problem making it to the toilet but there's always a butt and there's always exceptions that is just swallowing one piece of gum here and there typically no big deal what if you swallowed multiple pieces per day i've come across case studies where pediatric patients or little kids swallowed multiple pieces or whenever they had gum they would eventually swallow it rather than spit it out there's particular case studies where kids would swallow anywhere from five to ten pieces per day now in that case it can start to build up because you're getting too much of it in there and there's other cases where we swallow indigestible material for example i know we all don't like to think about this we've all swallowed hairs here and there and tends to not have a big deal when we swallow small amounts of hairs or you know every so often but there are psychiatric disorders where people will eat their hair and they'll get what's called a bees or trichobizor which is a buildup of hair and when you take them out sometimes they look like they're the shape of the actual here it is the shape of the actual stomach and those bees ors have to be removed if they build up too much so in certain cases extreme cases of swallowing multiple pieces of gum you can get a gum beezore and that could be a problem if it caused an obstruction and a buildup so in general what do we take home from this is it true that gum will stay in your system for seven years no it will not unless we have some of these extreme examples that doesn't mean i say swallow your gum i would still recommend spitting it out but you know if you had an occasional accident here and there where you swallowed it not too big of a deal so that takes care of our first topic in the truth versus lie and yes technically it is a lie or inaccurate to say that gum is going to stay in the stomach for over seven years so does that mean that really sleeping on the left side of your body is going to create health benefits well we have to look at that within certain situations or within context because just generally sleeping on the left side of your body is going to magically create all these health benefits but in say like a situation with acid reflux or what a lot of people just refer to as heartburn then we can see some potential benefits now for those of you who have not experienced heartburn that is when acid from the stomach regurgitates or refluxes and moves up the esophagus which is in the center of the chest behind the heart hence the nickname heartburn and that acid is irritating to the esophagus so here's the idea the stomach sits about like so on the left side of the body here and you can see that curvature if i can get my fingers on it i'll show you on the lower camera here like so so if you were to sleep on your left side it would tilt this curvature towards the bed and then the esophagus right here would actually be a little bit higher and the idea is that the gravity would help keep the acid down in this portion of the curvature and slow it or at least help prevent it sliding up the esophagus than say if you were just sleeping on your back the problem with that is is if you're anything like me and you start on your left side you could wake up in a completely different position later in the middle of the night especially if you're having say like a nightmare from like the scariest thing on planet earth which by the way is pennywise the dancing clown from stephen king it's movies or books i digress but regardless you can have this idea where you're moving around and so you might get a benefit for a little while and then you toss and turn and go the other side or lay on your back and so that is why instead of recommending laying on your left sides to say to like patients or medical professionals recommending to their patients they would say raise the head of the bed in other words they have patients put blocks on the back two legs of the bed or the legs that are at the head of the bed that are say like six to eight inches high and that way the bed slightly tilts so that no matter if you're on your left side your right side or your back that would help keep the acid from coming up into the esophagus now if you want more information on that we have a really cool youtube video for two reasons justin one does a really good job explaining acid reflux and so we'll put that a link to that but he also looks like he did the video by just rolling out of bed so you'll have fun being able to make fun of him in the comments as an added benefit the other situation where you could see a potential benefit from sleeping on your side is during pregnancy especially towards the end of the second trimester and into the third as the uterus enlarges as well as the fetus and laying on the back could compress vasculature or blood vessels for example there is a huge vein called the inferior vena cava that runs close to the spine and it drains blood from the lower limbs and the pelvis and if that were to get slightly compressed from the fetus in the uterus that could decrease blood flow back to mom's heart and overall decrease the general circulation and eventually even maybe affect the circulation back to the fetus so the idea is sleep on a side and that would take the pressure off of that posterior vasculature now in that case it doesn't necessarily have to be the left side or the right side so this is a little bit of a stretch when we're talking about a total truth or a total lie but one side or the other could be beneficial now i've never been pregnant so i'm not about to tell a mother and her second and third trimester totally how to sleep but you know we can get those benefits left versus right and it may improve the circulation and help mom be a little bit more comfortable during that pregnancy jeffrey and i want to take the time to say thank you for watching this video just getting to this point in the video helps the youtube algorithm show it to more people and getting more eyes on this content will help more people learn about this amazing machine that we call the human body if you want to further support us consider engaging the motor cortex in the frontal lobe of your brain so it can send a signal down to your forearm and hand muscles so that you can click the like subscribe button and maybe even leave some comments about what you might like to see in the future and what you thought of this video we've also got our anatomy t-shirts as well as our anatomical artwork that you can help support the channel with and i think that concludes all of my shameless plugs for 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