The Great Gum Chewing Conundrum

In my house we root for the Celtics and we loved watching coach Joe Mazzulla chew gum at like 30 chomps a minute, but the coach recently stopped chewing, saying he felt like gum was messing up his heart rate and hurting his breathing and focus.  That makes sense, but how do we square this with the growing evidence showing that people should chew gum to manage their anxiety?  A therapist I know says about half her patients no longer take daily medication and instead chew gum and do talk therapy – at ~$15,000 less a year, but dentists say chewing too much gum causes tooth decay. I started chewing gum in the 90s after Lloyd Braun chewed it on Seinfeld to impress Elaine Benes but my first editor at The Herald in Boston told me to stop when he saw me chewing Hubba Bubba during an interview with the Swampscott, Massachusetts school committee. “What are you 5?” he said. “Plus it’s bad taste.”  I suppose he was right – it did taste bad and it was immature - so I learned my lesson, but 25 years later I’m honestly more perplexed than ever about gum’s role in health. Maybe I ought to just limit chewing gum to special occasions, like before plane rides the way Pilot Chuck Yeager used to do to settle his stomach, or at Thanksgiving Dinner I could try Willy Wonka’s “Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum," tomato soup, roast beef and baked potatoes. But then my cardiologist may get upset…