Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
You’re on your first fast, and you sure miss eating. Perhaps oral motions that mimic food consumption such as sipping beverages and chewing gum would help you feel less hungry? You’d like to try, but you don’t want to break your fasted state with a stick or two of chewing gum. Are you allowed to munch on gum during a fast?
Jason Fung, MD, a fasting expert, says that yes, technically chewing gum does break a fast since it contains calories. The insulin response caused by the sweeteners is so minuscule though that you shouldn’t have to worry about derailing your fat burning.
In this article, we’ll talk more about whether chewing gum is the best option when on an intermittent or longer-term fast. If you’re curious whether sugar-free chewing gum is a better alternative, we’ll discuss that too. You won’t want to miss it!
Can You Chew Gum When Fasting?
When you go on a fast, the goal for many is to lose weight. As we’ve discussed on this blog, fasting allows you to achieve weight loss in two days. First, the number of calories you consume–if any–is insignificant enough that your body easily burns it, decreasing your weight.
Secondly, when your body burns through its energy supply from food, or glucose, it starts torching fat instead. When you fail to provide your body more glucose, this fat-burning can continue for the duration of your fast.
Ingesting calories breaks a fast. Some fasters say technically even a single calorie is enough, while others grant you more leeway and claim it’s around 35 to 50 calories or so. That’s why very low-calorie beverages like black coffee and some teas are permitted on fasts.
Keeping all that in mind, let’s more closely examine chewing gum so we can definitively answer whether it’s a good thing to enjoy when fasting.
Nutrition Information
You’re not supposed to swallow chewing gum, but as you put it in your mouth and chew, you do ingest calories. For an eight-gram block of gum, it’s 29 calories.
The gum contains no fat, nor any cholesterol, sodium, potassium, or protein. It also lacks vitamins and minerals such as magnesium, vitamin B-6, iron, vitamin C, cobalamin, vitamin D, calcium, and vitamin A.
You’d have to expect some sugar, and there’s 5 grams. You also consume 0.2 grams of dietary fiber and 8 grams of carbohydrates per piece of gum.
Breaking the Fast?
Since chewing gum contains calories, yes, you’re technically breaking the fast if you unwrap some of this tasty candy during your fasting period. Dr. Fung said as much in the POPSUGAR article we linked you to in the intro.
Glucose Response from Sugar
What about those roughly 5 grams of sugar contained in an average piece of chewing gum? Do those interrupt your fast?
Going back to what we said before, your body uses glucose for energy. Glucose is a type of simple sugar that’s especially copious when we consume refined grains and sugars as well as carbohydrates. The leftover glucose we don’t need right now goes into our fat cells, where it can become fat.
This happens thanks to insulin, a type of pancreas-produced hormone that transports sugar to the cells. In a healthy person, your insulin levels will naturally fluctuate throughout the day depending on what you eat and how long you go between meals. A diabetic may have even more wild fluctuations with their insulin.
Let’s say you’re a healthy person on a fast, and you don’t eat for a while. Your insulin levels will decrease, right? Indeed. This allows the fat cells to let the sugars out that they had been holding onto. Now these sugars–or glucose–can become our energy source when we’re running low.
When this happens, it’s known as an insulin response.
You want to restrict your body’s insulin response when fasting, because the goal is to begin burning fat cells instead of glucose. If your body keeps letting go of extra sugars due to an insulin response, then you’re not going to achieve much weight loss.
Dr. Fung said this in the POPSUGAR article: “Yes, sweeteners can certainly produce an insulin response, but generally for gum, the effect is so small that there is likely no problem from it. So yes, technically it does break the fast, but no, it usually doesn’t matter.”
The Verdict
So where does that leave us? We think Dr. Fung said it best. While you technically do break your fast by chewing gum, you’re not going to affect your fast to the point where you don’t lose weight. The only way that would happen is if you chew sugary gum all day and all night. A piece or two throughout the day should not hinder your weight loss.
This is pretty good news, as gum can be beneficial in a multitude of ways. Since you’re getting some sugar from a single piece, chewing gum may be able to reduce your sugar cravings. That could keep you from diving into a mega-sized dessert when your fast wraps up.
Also, seeing as how you’re trying to lose weight, chewing gum can help. This WebMD report cites a study from the University of Rhode Island. When participants munched on gum throughout the day, they cut down on their caloric lunch load by as many as 68 calories. They didn’t make up it for at dinner, either, but kept their food moderation going for the entire day.
The study also found that those participants who chewed gum burned more calories–five percent more–compared to the participants who didn’t enjoy any gum.
What about Sugar-Free Chewing Gum? Is That Better?
You’re happy to learn that chewing gum doesn’t impact your weight loss potential or interrupt your fast that much. Still, to be on the safe side, you figured maybe you’d try sugar-free gum instead. Would that be better for you on your fast?
Let’s look a little closer at the nutrition information for sugar-free gum. A single stick of Wrigley’s Extra Sugar-Free Gum that’s 2.84 grams contains 5 calories and 2 grams of net carbs. You’re lacking any amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, vitamins, protein, and fiber, but you’re also skipping the sodium and–most importantly–the sugar.
Don’t get too excited yet. If you read our recent post on diet soda, then you may remember how even though this beverage was touted as being zero calories, it still had hidden calories not printed on the label.
It’s the same situation with sugar-free gum, more or less. If you’ve ever wondered why a stick of sugar-free gum tastes so sweet, it’s due to the array of sweeteners within. These are sugar alcohols, a sugar-based organic compound. Sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, isomalt, and xylitol are the five big sugar alcohols that appear in sugar-free gum most frequently.
Compared to other sugar sources, sugar alcohol is supposedly healthier for you because it’s lower in calories. That’s not all true, though. Sugar alcohols are considered a fermentable oligo-, di-, mono-saccharides and polyols or FODMAP.
FODMAPS can affect your ability to digest food, causing symptoms like bloating and an upset stomach, especially from sugar alcohol.
You can’t get drunk on sugar alcohol, despite its name. Instead, your body treats sugar alcohol like any other sugar.
On the glycemic index, a determinant of which foods increase your blood sugar and how quickly, certain sugar alcohols are worse than others. Maltitol gives you the biggest blood sugar spike, followed by xylitol, sorbitol, lactitol, sucralose, mannitol, and erythritol.
If some of those names seem unfamiliar, that’s because not every sugar alcohol mentioned above is necessarily found in sugar-free gum. Still, the gum does contain maltitol, the sugar alcohol that most increases your blood sugar. Its glycemic index rating is 36.
That may sound high, but it’s not significant, especially when looking at the glycemic indices of carb-heavy and sugar-heavy foods. That said, a glycemic index rating of 36 is likely enough to trigger an insulin response just like regular gum.
Also, although sugar-free gum has fewer calories, it’s not entirely calorie-free, so you’re still technically breaking your fast. That means any differences between how your body processes regular chewing gum and sugar-free gum is small enough that you can chew what you prefer.
Conclusion
Chewing gum is a tasty treat you might reach for on a fast to reduce your hunger. Since it contains calories, you’re technically breaking your fast. The insulin response from chewing gum shouldn’t derail your fat-burning or weight loss goals, though.
The same is true of sugar-free gum. It may not be loaded with sugars per se, but it contains sugar alcohols. One of these, maltitol, is high enough on the glycemic index that sugar-free gum is practically no different than regular chewing gum for causing an insulin response.
Now that you know all this, you can make smarter choices for your fasts going forward. Best of luck!