Attention, Vegans: This Red-Flag Ingredient Might Be Hiding In Your Favorite Chewing Gum

There's a lot to consider when choosing daily diets for healthy living, and that goes double for vegan food devotees. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be questionable, undisclosed ingredients to worry about, but unfortunately, some food-product categories harbor sweet secrets with sour implications — including those smackable packets of chewing gum. It's only gum, not a part of the U.S. food pyramid, but it's still something you put in your mouth and ingest. That's why it's worth considering one ingredient lurking inside: lanolin, otherwise known as sheep's oil or sheep's grease. 

Lanolin is the same component used for skin and hair care products and other cosmetics as soothing agents for cracked lips, minor scratches and cuts, diaper rashes, and more. Why it ends up in chewing gum may seem a mystery, but it's really quite simple: the greasy sheep oil, secreted from sheep's skin into the wool, is used to make foods soft and chewing gum chewable. Based on the ingredient list, vegans could reasonably expect nothing animal-derived, but that sheep's grease is a hidden red flag waving silently in many gum brands.  

In the U.S., lanolin is specifically permitted as a component of "chewing gum base" under federal food-additive rules. As a collective term, it can contain several permitted substances, including lanolin, which is an approved component in the plasticizing materials category, so there's no need to list it separately. In other words, you'd likely never know it was there. 

Whether lanolin in chewing gum is a problem depends on your perspective. On the pro side, lanolin has a very practical reason for being there: it makes your favorite gum softer with more elasticity. It may not seem like a big deal if you're not vegan or have sensitivities to lanolin, but lack of clear labeling on food products is a consumer-transparency problem across the board that makes making informed choices more difficult. That's especially so for consumers adhering to vegan standards, since lanolin is from an animal, even though it's not meat or dairy.

If you want gum without sheep grease, choose brands that identify as vegan and use a plant-based gum base. Some available options are Simply Gum, a vegan option that uses a gum base of chicle, derived from tree sap. Additional products include Chewsy and True Gum, which use the same sap from gum trees for plant-based chewing. These types of products are much closer to resembling those from chewing gum's ancient origins. For more startling food revelations, check out the six popular sweet snacks made with unusual ingredients.