The Sundarban
While tens of thousands of companies went bankrupt at some stage in the Great Depression, William Wrigley Jr. continued to make money. “I assume americans bite harder when they are sad,” Wrigley said, whose chewing gum empire created Juicy Fruit and Spearmint. Although many americans reach for gum to freshen their breath, in the early twentieth century, gum also promised to calm you down. “It steadies nerves,” according to one of Wrigley’s advertisements from 1918.
This marketing strategy is now making a comeback as companies attempt to raise gum sales. Over the last five years, americans have stopped chewing. Sales declined at some stage in the pandemic, shedding by almost a third in the U.S., and some classic gums have been discontinued, appreciate Fruit Stripe. To combat the decline, gum companies are once again pitching gum as a salve for the mind, rather than for the mouth. Unusual ads pronounce americans to “bite thru” their concerns, or promise gum can tranquil intrusive thoughts.
Wrigley was a marketing maven; his sales pitch wasn’t exactly based on established science. Yet he perceived to stumble upon something surprisingly real about the soothing qualities of gum that is calm fair today.
When scientists have investigated the cognitive effects of gum, they’ve stumbled on that chewing does seem to aid with attention as effectively as nick stress in those that regularly bite gum. But a mystery has eluded them: why will we appreciate chewing gum to initiate with?
It’s confounding: Although the flavors can be enticing, gum has no nutritional value, and americans usually sustain chewing once the taste is gone. There appears to be something about the basic act of chewing itself that is appealing, and a potentially easy way to relax or toughen your considering. How may perhaps the motion of transferring the jaw change the way you are feeling?
How chewing gum took over the globe—and became an early wellness style
Humans have created gum for themselves to bite for thousands of years, and the practice has been documented all over the globe, in diverse cultures. One of the oldest chewing gums ever stumbled on was from roughly 8000 years ago in Scandinavia, made of birch bark pitch. There, hunter-gatherers would bite the sticky stuff to make a glue for their instruments. But in this instance, teeth marks from the gum revealed that some of the chewers were adolescence, as younger as 5 years archaic, which implies they may perhaps have been chewing for enjoyment–and to now not make anything. The ancient Greeks, Native Americans, and the Mayans also chewed sticky substances that came from bushes, appreciate chicle from the sapodilla tree.
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Gum came to the United States when a Unusual York inventor obtained his hands on some chicle from an exiled Mexican president sometime in the 1850s. The inventor originally tried to point out it into a rubber exchange, and when that didn’t work, began to make chewing gum.
Wrigley played a large role in atmosphere off the American gum style. He started out promoting soap and baking soda. Chewing gum was accurate a freebie he included with purchases. But in the 1890s he noticed that the gum was more enticing than his other products, and became his focus fully to gum.
“William Wrigley, amongst many things, was a marketing genius,” said Jennifer Matthews, an anthropologist at Trinity University and author of Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas, From the Ancient Maya to William Wrigley. Wrigley created billboards that ran many miles long out of doors of Atlantic Metropolis. He even shipped sticks of gum to each address in the U.S. phonebook.
For the duration of the height of the gum industrial in the twentieth century, gum was so popular as to suggested hand-wringing articles in the Unusual York Times. “Peep up in the elevated cars or in the Subway cars, and if there is a row of younger females of the saleslady class opposite you the chances rather are that they can be seen masticating in a sad sincerity, appreciate so many cows in a row in a stable,” a journalist from 1906 bemoaned. Unusual York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, pleaded with gum companies to aid with how powerful gum littered the streets.
Wrigley approached the U.S. military at some stage in World War I, pitching gum to aid infantrymen stave off starvation and clean their teeth. “And—that if you are fearful, you can bite on it,” Matthews said. “The military sold into that argument, and since then, has included chewing gum in the rations for U.S. military personnel.” Chewing gum then spread all over the world thru infantrymen.
With the proliferation of gum around the world, so did reviews of its supposed health benefits. In 1916, one article pushed gum by writing, “Are you disquieted? Bite gum. Way you lie awake at evening? Bite gum. Are you heart-broken? Is the world against you? Bite gum.” This idea lasted for decades; in the Nineteen Forties, a four-year-research at Barnard college stumbled on chewing resulted in lower tension, but the lead author couldn’t say exactly why. “The gum-chewer relaxes and will get more work done,” the Unusual York Times wrote about the research’s outcomes. “Chewing adds to his zest—one may probably say his gumption.”
What contemporary science says about chewing gum and the brain
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Wrigley’s legacy in circulating the benefits of gum persists. In 2006, the Wrigley Company created the Wrigley Science Institute to fund experiments and PhD positions to investigate the benefits of chewing gum, though researchers did experiments in their absorb labs and printed ends in witness-reviewed journals. Andrew Smith, a psychologist at Cardiff University, researched gum for around 15 years, typically funded by Wrigley.
Research that are funded by industrial tend to have more favorable outcomes. But Smith said that his and his colleagues’ research have had mixed findings.
