Skip to content

Rallying for Gumballs

gum-good-for-youHere’s one you might want to take with a grain of utadiene-based synthetic rubber.

It turns out that chewing gum in class might be a pretty good idea after all.

Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine took 108 eighth-grade math students from a Houston, Texas, charter school and divided them into two groups, following them for 14 weeks. One group chewed gum while doing homework and during test-taking situations. The other group did not chew gum at all.

The results were surprising. The gum-chewing students had a 3 percent increase in their standardized math test scores compared with those who did not chew gum. Also, the students who chewed gum had better final grades compared with the non-chompers.
Don’t Miss

Chewing gum is an easy tool students can use for a potential academic edge,” says Craig Johnston, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an instructor in nutrition at the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine.

Maybe gum really can give students an edge, but anyone want to guess who sponsored the study?

Dispensed as