One hot summer day in 2011, Samantha Jenkins left
her house to go to the local co-op with her friends.
When she came back home, she immediately went into her room.
Later, she told her mother she was feeling out
of sorts, saying that she bought a can of pop
at the store but “it's gone right through me.”
Sam’s mother, Maria Morgan, gave her daughter some tea
to help hydrate, but she could barely even hold the mug.
When she tried to pick it up, it kept falling to the floor.
Morgan went to grab her daughter a blanket, but
froze when she heard a massive thud from her room.
When she came back, Sam looked up and asked “is this what
it’s like to die?” before she was rushed to the hospital.
Medical staff, after failing to bring her condition
under control, had to pronounce Sam dead before
they were able to determine what was wrong with her.
Having lost her daughter in a matter of hours, Morgan
was desperate for answers, but after finding hundreds
of chewing gum wrappers in her daughter’s bedroom,
she found the smoking gum she was looking for.
When Samantha arrived at the hospital,
she began convulsing violently.
This terrified her mother and doctors alike, since
her seizing was keeping them from administering
the medications she needed to survive.
Doctors decided to put her into an induced coma to end her
convulsions so they could finally administer medical aid.
Doctors found that her convulsions were caused by a deficiency
of calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium, but they had
no clue what was depriving her body of salts and minerals.
Sam was then placed on a ventilator, but when they took
her off the machine, she had fallen into a coma herself.
Morgan was told that “as far as they
could see that something had poisoned her.
It was just about trying to fathom out what it was
so they could possibly save her" but it was too late.
In the end, Pathologist Dr Paul Griffiths announced
that Sam passed away from “cerebral hypoxia caused
by convulsions and electrolyte depletion”, which
basically means that her electrolytes were so low
that it gave her seizures, and her convulsions cut
off oxygen supply to her brain, leading to her death.
When doctors asked Morgan if there was anything
that might have changed about her daughter’s habits
leading up to her death, she didn’t have a clue.
Sam’s sister, Sophie, mentioned however, that
she had been chewing a lot of gum lately.
Morgan and Sophie then searched Sam’s bedroom
and found hundreds of sugar-free gum wrappers.
"Every bag that she had and every drawer in her bedroom
there were chewing gum wrappers, empty chewing gum boxes.
Every handbag had receipts at the bottom of it where
she would buy chewing gum” said Morgan of her findings.
Not only was Morgan unaware of her daughter’s gum habits, she
likely wouldn’t have thought anything of it if she did know.
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Doctors certainly were concerned when they found
balls of chewing gum lodged inside Sam’s stomach.
Dr Griffith said “It was unusual, there was about
four to five lumps of it”, but he also noted that
“there is a potential for this much chewing gum
to cause this problem, but it’s not a hard fact.”
Did gum actually cause the convulsions
that tragically took Sam’ life?
Or is there something else going on here?
Sam’s convulsions kept her from breathing properly, which
denied her brain the oxygen it needed, all because of
an electrolyte imbalance, but what could have drained
her of electrolytes, and how could they cause seizures?
Your nervous system, in order to work properly,
needs to maintain electrical “excitability”.
Neurons form your entire nervous system, and
they’re basically tiny individual links in very long
electro-chemical wires that snake around your body.
Electrolytes are minerals and salts that conduct
electricity when they are combined with water.
Your body balances electrolytes through
osmosis, which is the process of a substance
equalizing its concentration across a liquid.
If you have too much, you’ll urinate it away.
Electrolytes help your neurons maintain
the right electrical conductivity.
Think of it like this: steel is a better conductor than,
say, rubber, but it doesn’t conduct as well as gold.
Any alteration in levels can have effects on how
easily currents pass across your nervous system.
Having low or high electrolytes levels can result
in “abnormal electrical discharges”, which is
basically your brain sending out random signals.
When this happens, the currents glitch out
like the swingset from Grand Theft Auto 4.
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Typically, we get plenty of electrolytes from the food we eat.
We get sodium from salts, potassium from fruits like
bananas, calcium from dairy or leafy greens, and so on.
Unless Sam had made some drastic dietary changes, it’s likely
that her electrolytes deficiency was from something else.
Something prevented her body from absorbing them.
There are a few possible culprits behind her untimely passing.
Sam’s mother found “hundreds of sugar-free
Trident wrappers and receipts with several
packets of chewing gum on them” in her bedroom.
In interviews following her passing Morgan
has said “As a parent, you give your kids
chewing gum and you don’t think anything of it.
The artificial stuff that is in chewing gum
is so dangerous — aspartame and sorbitol”.
However, Dr Paul Griffiths, the coroner for this case,
said that calling sweeteners the cause of death is dubious.
“There is very little evidence.
There are only two case reports about weight loss,
no one has actually died as a result of chewing gum”.
He also noted that the lack of magnesium, calcium,
sodium and potassium, 4 important electrolytes, could
have been caused by the masses of chewing gum lodged
in her stomach, not necessarily the sweeteners.
So was it Aspartame, Sorbitol, or an intestinal blockage
that prevented her body from absorbing these minerals?
We’ve talked about aspartame before, but in
short, it’s about 200 times sweeter than sugar,
and has been approved by the FDA since 1983.
It is also one of the most researched chemical
additives in human food supplies, and has been
considered safe to consume under certain concentrations.
That being said, aspartame has been seen to deplete magnesium,
one of the minerals that Sam lacked leading up to her passing.
Although salt, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, carbs, and
regular old stress can impair magnesium absorption.
But what does this have to do with Sam’s death?
Well, not only did she have a deficiency of this mineral,
but magnesium has also been connected with loss of appetite,
nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and weakness, and what doctors
call “a marked irritability of the nervous system”, which
means that in severe cases, you can suffer seizures.
Aspartame isn’t the most prevalent sweetener
in the gum that Sam was eating though.
She might have been experiencing some adverse effects,
but it’s likely not the answer we’re looking for.
On the same note, Xylitol is likewise present in
Trident gum at lower levels than other sweeteners.
Not only that, but in one long term study, participants
ate an average of 3 pounds of Xylitol per month,
with a daily intake around 400 grams, and none
of them experienced any major negative effects.
However it should be noted that sugar alcohols, of
which aspartame and xylitol are included, can cause
gastrointestinal issues when consumed in larger quantities.
But how severe, and the concentration
is dependent on the person.
So if aspartame isn’t the major sweetener
for the gum Sam was eating, what was?
Trident gum uses about 1.25 grams of
Sorbitol as a primary sweetener per stick.
With around 16-18 sticks per pack, an entire pack
of gum contains around 20-22 grams of sorbitol.
So if Sam was to be poisoned by artificial sweeteners,
then Sorbitol would have been in the highest concentration.
Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol that is used
mostly in the food industry as a sweetener,
and to improve shelf life as a preservative.
It does occur naturally in lots of fruits too,
like apples, pears, and raisins among others.
So, what does sorbitol do to your body?
Doses of more than 20 grams of sorbitol per day can cause
diarrhea, keep in mind that that is only 1 pack’s worth.
And according to Samantha Liauw, MD, there
is at least one case report of weight
loss associated with sorbitol consumption.
Diarrhea is basically just when your intestines
can’t absorb all the liquids from the foods you eat.
Usually, 90% of all fluid entering the small intestine
is absorbed by your body, but when something limits
your intestines’ absorption, you get diarrhea.
Now, diarrhea isn’t just gross, it’s also dangerous!
If any of you have traveled the Oregon Trail,
you know just how quickly dysentery can take you.
Diarrhea is dangerous not only because it can
dehydrate you in a snap, it can also deplete your
body of key minerals like sodium, potassium, and
chloride, which also happen to be electrolytes.
And if you remember, Sam’s had low levels
of magnesium, calcium, sodium and potassium.
So perhaps the laxative effects of sorbitol
are what threw her body out of whack?
It’s hard to say.
There aren’t any reports that she was suffering from any
wayward laxative effects, but that’s probably for the best.
There is another possible culprit here.
If you remember, Dr Griffiths said that “four or
five bright green lumps” lodged in Sam’s stomach
which turned out to be balls of chewing gum.
Sam’s electrolyte deficiency could have been
caused by a simple stomach blockage, which kept
her body from absorbing the nutrients she needed.
See, swallowing one piece of gum isn’t so bad.
It’ll pass right through you like anything else, and
it definitely doesn’t stay in your body for 7 years.
It might stay in you for like, 48 hours, but
whenever your body encounters something it can’t
break down in acid and absorb, it’ll just dump it.
It’s the intestinal equivalent of
sorting the recycle from the trash.
But when you swallow a lot of gum, or just
some gum with other non-digestible objects,
that’s when you can “gum up” the works.
An intestinal blockage could also
explain Sam’s electrolyte deficiency.
The symptoms do include severe abdominal pain and
vomiting, and if she was eating an entire package of gum
per day, it seems safe to assume that she was at risk.
Sam’s mother, Morgan has lamented that “They
wouldn’t put down that it was definitely from
chewing gum, but aided from chewing gum”.
Doctors and scientists worth their salt will rarely use
decisive language like “this caused that” or “this proves
that” because they’ve been trained to recognize that the
world is more complicated than simple cause and effect.
Our bodies are especially complicated, and we’re
constantly maintaining a balance that keeps us going.
All it takes is too much of something
to quickly throw us out of balance.
This isn’t a story about speculating on the death of a
young girl, but understanding how important it is to learn
as much as we can about what we’re putting into our bodies.
Chemicals aren’t inherently “bad” or “good”.
What can become bad is our
relationships with those substances.
Sugar isn’t bad, but our relationship to
it as a culture is making us unhealthy.
In the end, chewing gum isn’t bad, nor
is sorbitol, or xylitol, or aspartame.
What is dangerous is our relationship to these substances.
Just be informed about what is going into your body,
and you can avoid any sticky situations in the future.