Here’s some news you can use, especially if you work in an office and really can’t run to the bathroom every fifteen minutes without someone noticing. “Many sugar-free chewing gums contain a sweetener called sorbitol. Sorbitol is a laxative which is poorly absorbed by the small intestine.” Normally, this doesn’t matter, but if you’re one of those crazy people who takes something wayyy too far, and you tend to chew over a pack a day, you might want to switch to a different gum brand.

The warning comes after doctors came across two patients who had chronic diarrhea, abdominal pain and dangerously excessive weight loss. After lengthy investigations which could not identify why the patients were losing so much weight and had chronic diarrhea and pains, a detailed analysis of eating habits put the problem down to eating too much chewing gum with sorbitol.

One of the patients, a 21-year-old woman, had been eating the equivalent of 18-20g of sorbitol each day. The average stick of gum has about 1.25g sorbitol – so, she was chewing through 15-18 sticks of gum each day. The other patient, a 46-year-old man, was chewing about 20 sticks of sorbitol-containing gum plus approximately 200g of sweets (candy) each day – his total sorbitol daily intake was about 30g, the authors wrote.

This is why we’re here—to help protect consumers from embarrassing bathroom issues (although you won’t believe how hard it was not to repackage this along the “extreme weight loss” angle and cross-post it to Jezebel just for more hits).

“Chewing Gum Sweetener Can Cause Dangerous Weight Loss” [Medical News TODAY]
(Photo: Getty)

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