Teenagers and younger children can get headaches from chewing gum.
Migraine, tension headaches, and now gum headache
It’s an older study from 2013 and frankly, it has little to do with fitness. Still, I found it to be an interesting fact worth sharing.
Headaches can have many causes such as stress, heat, lack of sleep, noise, video games, smoking, etc. However, Dr. Nathan Watemberg of the Meir Medical Center affiliated with Tel Aviv University noticed that many of his young patients with headache complaints chewed gum daily.
Of the 30 patients who stopped chewing gum, the headache disappeared completely in 19 cases and in 7 other cases to a large extent. When the 26 patients whose symptoms disappeared or diminished resumed chewing gum, the symptoms returned within a few days.
Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ)
Two previous studies had already shown a link between chewing gum and headaches. However, those studies offered two different possible causes. One possible cause could be the sweetener aspartame. However, Dr. Watemberg finds this unlikely given that people would then have much more trouble with other products containing more aspartame (such as ‘diet’ soft drinks).
The other explanation is that too much stress is placed on the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), already the most used joint in the body.
“Every doctor knows that overuse of the TMJ will cause headaches. I believe this is what’s happening when children and teenagers chew gum excessively.”
