Many patients suffer with difficulty in defacating and constipation after major surgeries, and it is something that doctors try to work on to get the patient comfortable again, although laxatives are generally not recommended since a natural way to get them moving again is the preferred method.

Well, it turns out that chewing ordinary gum may actually help to stimulate the bowels back into action after getting surgery. Analysis was done on patients who had just had major surgery and were experiencing the typical problems with their bowel movements that most patients who’ve been under do, and the patients that gnoshed on chewing gum often had better bowel function than those who did not.

It is thought that chewing gum helps trick the body into secretint pancreatic enzymes and other helpful secretions that break the food down and gets the digestive juices going, which in turn gets waste moving smoothly out of the body. On average, patients who chewed gum had a bowel movement after surgery about one day sooner than patients who did not chew gum. Pretty impressive for such a cheap gimmick!

It was also mentioned that chewing the sugarless variety of gum may have additional benefits to the chewer after surgery because of the sugar substitute’s laxative effect (which, if you’ve ever chewed sugarless gum, you may have experienced, maybe in excess gas though, since it does have a slightly laxative effect which can also build up gas in the intestinal tract).

The only potential problem noted in the study is the fact that chewing gum can introduce too much air into the stomach causing discomfort for some who tend to swallow a lot of air when chomping on their wrigley’s. I think if the mouth is kept fully shut that problem could be minimized though.