Does Chewing Gum Burn Calories?

What are the effects of chewing gum on hunger and appetite?  

“Horace Fletcher,” proclaimed one of his obituaries in 1919, “taught the world to chew.” Also known as the “Great Masticator,” Fletcher was a health reformer who popularized the idea of chewing each mouthful more than 32 times—“once for every tooth.” It wasn’t put to the test, though, until nearly a century later. In that study, participants were told to eat pasta until they felt “comfortably full” and were randomized to chew each mouthful either 10 times or 35 times before swallowing. The subjects were told the study was about the effects of chewing on mood, but that was just a ruse. The researchers really wanted to know whether prolonged chewing reduced food intake. And, as it turned out, those who chewed more felt full earlier than those who chewed less, such that they ended up eating about a third of a cup less pasta overall. 

If chewing suppresses the appetite in some way, what about chewing gum as a weight-loss strategy? As I discuss in my video How Many Calories Do You Burn Chewing Gum?, an article entitled “Benefits of Chewing Gum” suggested as much by saying that it “may be a useful behavior modification tool in appetite control and weight management,” but it was co-written by the executive director of The Wrigley Science Institute and a senior manager at the Wm Wrigley Jr Company. Why don’t we see what the unbiased science says? 

Big Gum likes to point to a letter published in 1999 in The New England Journal of Medicine. In it, Mayo Clinic researchers claimed that chewing gum could burn 11 calories an hour. Critics pointed to the fact that they didn’t really test “typical” gum chewing; they instead tested chewing the equivalent of four sticks of gum “at a very rapid cadence.” Specifically, the participants were told to chew at a frequency of exactly 100 Hertz (Hz) “with the aid of a metronome” for 12 minutes. That seemed to burn 2.2 calories, hence, potentially 11 calories an hour. 

One might have had more confidence in the Mayo scientists’ conclusion had they not lacked a fundamental understanding of basic units. As defined by Merriam-Webster, hertz is a unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second, so 100 Hz would mean 100 chews per second. (That would be a very rapid cadence!) If it’s true that 11 calories may be burned an hour, though, that means you could burn more calories actively chewing gum while sitting in a chair than you would if you weren’t chewing gum while upright at a standing desk. 

In fact, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:24 in my video, chewing one small piece of gum at your own pace may only burn about three calories an hour, which would approximate the calorie content of the sugar-free gum itself. However, chewing off the calories of a piece of sugar-sweetened gum might take all day. What about the purported appetite-suppressing effect of all that chewing, though?