Many an alley near a school has a locally-acclaimed gum wall -- the side of a building or garage where kids stick their used contraband chewing gum. Sometimes the gum repository is only a telephone pole, but it's a collaborative piece of street art created out of necessity, due to schools' no-tolerance rules for chewing gum in class.
Now imagine that you are a gum manufacturer, like say Wrigley. If you could just find some way to convince school teachers, principals and parents that it was good for kids to chew gum in class.
GET RID OF NO-GUM RULE
Think of the profits -- all of those school kids chewing gum all day. It would have to be something really good, congruent with the ideals of teaching to bring down the no-gum rule. How about -- "Chewing gum makes kids smarter!" Oh yeah! If you can get them to believe this, even school janitors might feel guilty if they complained.
Maybe you could build a whole campaign around how gum is good for you. These same people are worried about childhood obesity and how to get kids to eat healthy and not get fat. Hey, you could convince them that chewing gum reduces snack cravings, especially the sweet stuff. As a gum manufacturer, like Wrigley, you could sell even more gum! Hell, you could provide the vending machines for your gum right in the school hallways. Tell the schools that you'll share the profits with them -- particularly those schools whose budgets continue to get slashed are desperate for more money. That would be all of them.
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
What you need to do is make it scientific, research studies with proof that gum is good for kids. But how? You could fund the studies yourself, give researchers grants from your company's own Science Institute. After all, you get what you pay for.
Next, get a spokesperson you can use in your advertising who is wholesome, with a reputation that both kids and their parents can look up to and admire to represent your image and sell your product. Note: the idol-type should not be stupid, since you're trying to sell the public on the idea that chewing gum makes kids smarter. This is just what Wrigley's Gum did -- all of the above. Or, they "tried."
First off, we should discuss Wrigley's choice of a famous representative to promote their gum.The bubble burst on this one, leaving Wrigley with gum all over its public face. It's going to be a mess to clean up.
WRIGLEY STEPPED INTO A MESS
The company chose as its wholesome famous guy 19-year-old R&B singer Chris Brown. Cute guy with cute girlfriend and both pop stars. Then just as Wrigley was about to begin its campaign claiming gum will make your kid smarter, what does Brown go and do?
You can see for yourself by looking at the photo ((below) of his girlfriend Rihanna, wearing sunglasses to hide her black eye and bruised face.
WHOLESOME AND SMART ROLE MODEL?
After Brown was arrested and charged with two felonies for assaulting Rihanna in March, Wrigley dropped him. According to court records and detective's notes from the scene of the assault: Brown punched Rihanna while driving, bit her, put her in a headlock and threatened to kill her, reports Pollstar.
Gum makes you smarter? Whether or not he was chewing gum at the time of the assault has not been reported.To be fair, Wrigley never claimed chewing gum would make you a compassionate human being or prevent violent behavior.
UNBIASED, TRANSPARENT RESEARCH?
In April, results of research funded by Wrigley, was released by Baylor University of Medicine in Houston. Researchers at Baylor studied four math classes, or 108 students, aged 13 to 16 years old from a Houston charter school that serves mostly low-income Hispanic students.
Researchers said they found that students who chewed Wrigley's sugar-free gum during math class had higher scores on a standardized math test after 14 weeks than students who did not chew gum. The difference was small, only 3 percent higher for gum-chewers, but significant researchers said.
IS IT THE TEST, GUM OR ANY ORAL PACIFIER?
The test the students took resulting in this 3 percent increase in math scores was the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills achievement test. Yet, they found no difference in math scores between students who chewed gum and those who did not in another test called the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement, as reported by Reuters. This suggests that whether gum makes kids smarter must depend upon the test, not the gum.
The gum chewers did get better final grades in class work. However, it is recognized that class grades are most certainly effected by subjective behaviors of the teacher.
Another interesting bit in this story is that Baylor researchers presented their findings at the American Society for Nutrition scientific meeting. What? Is chewing gum now a nutritious food stuff?
CORRELATION ISN'T PROOF
The correlation between chewing gum and learning math, according to Gil Leveille, executive director of the Wrigley Science Institute, is: Chewing reduced stress, which lowers levels of cortisol in the body, and kids who are less stressed learn better, says Parent Dish.
Others have serious questions about the validity of this research, funded by Wrigley.
REASON FOR RESEARCH = SELL MORE GUM
"The only reason to do these studies is to sell more gum," Marion Nestle, Ph.D., a nutritionist at New York University told CNN. Concerned about the funds being pumped into research by the gum industry, Nestle continued, "Sponsored studies almost invariably produce results favorable to the economic interests of the sponsor. (They) are always designed in ways that fail to control for alternative explanations for the results."
Wrigley and the Wrigley Science Institute funding research on the goodness of chewing gum reminds me of Vanderbilt University's Institute of Coffee Studies, which is funded by millions from coffee growers, and its research on how good coffee/caffeine is for your health.
Studies such as these are "difficult to evaluate" since "it is not possible to tell if chewing gum has an influence or whether those who chew gum are different in other ways from those who did not," said Michael Posner, Ph.D, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. He tells Web MD that there's no evidence in the study that higher scores in math or other subjects wouldn't result from "any form of eating or other movements...It could even be that the attitude created by being allowed to do something that might be forbidden in class might be important to the effect."
IS GUM GOOD OR BAD FOR YOU?
Although the Wrigley Science Institute declines to say just how much money it's spending on research, we know Wrigley is spending money to fund research which claims chewing gum is good for you. To provide some balance, the following are some "health warnings" repeated from a number of medical sources on"Why Chewing Gum Is Bad For Your Health":
- You use eight different facial muscles to chew. Unnecessary chewing can create chronic tightness in two of these muscles, located close to your temples, contributing to chronic, intermittent headaches.
- Six salivary glands located throughout your mouth are stimulated to produce and release saliva whenever you chew. Producing a steady stream of saliva for chewing gum is a waste of energy and resources that could otherwise be used for essential metabolic activities.
- Most chewing gum is sweetened by aspartame. Short and long term use of aspartame has been closely linked with cancer, diabetes, neurological disorders and birth defects. If sweetened by sorbitol, this substance can have laxative effects at high doses.
GUM IS BIG BUSINESS
The popularity of gum continues to grow -- particularly with all of the new flavors. Last year sales topped $1.2 billion last year and sales of sugar-free gum increased by more than 11 percent in 2008. It's definitely big business.
Speaking of big business, Wm Wrigley Jr Co is now a part of Mars Inc. And Mars, Hershey, Nestle and Cadbury -- which together control 75 percent of the U.S. chocolate market -- are facing accusations of price-fixing. In fact, there are 87 antitrust suits against them, accusing the companies of secret price-fixing meetings and conspiring to raise chocolate candy prices in three contemporaneous and nearly identical prices increases since 2002.
Maybe it'll be shown that Mars/Wrigley is only unethical when it comes to chocolate, but not gum.
Or maybe, they'll fund some new research that will prove eating chocolate Mars bars can make you a genius!
They could sponsor a new reality TV show and have a chew-off between chewing gum and candy bars while contestants swing from vines through the trees in some exotic jungle. That's when, by accident, they find out that if you tear off a piece of chewed gum and apply it to a snake bite, it'll suck the poison right out as it dries.
READ "MEDICAL ETHICS RULES OF DISCLOSURE"
READ "MATH SMARTS FROM CHOCOLATE & GUM: SUSPECT RESEARCH CLAIMS"
By Sharon McEachern
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