It's hard to get excited about gum. I mean, really, what can be done with it? You can try a different shape or a different flavor or a new ad campaign ("the flavor never stops!"), but in the end it's something you chew for a while, it starts to not taste that great anymore, and then you throw it away. But once in a great while you find some gum that's a little bit different.

Take Orbit's Lemon-Lime. I can't remember if I've ever had this flavor of gum before (maybe Fruit Stripes had this flavor?), but this is quite good. It's actually refreshing, in a lemon-lime drink sort of way, and you can even squeeze out some intense flavor even late in the chewing game. That's all I really look for in my gum-chewing experience, and Orbit succeeds in a big way.

(Hmmm....Nicole reviewed this a couple of years ago and didn't like it. Oh well.)

Ah, one of the eternal questions, right up there with "Do you really have to wait an hour after eating before you swim?" and "How many licks does it take to get the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?"

And now the question is answered at the Scientific American Web site. The old wisdom warned that you shouldn't swallow gum because it takes the body seven years to digest it. But the folks at Scientific American have investigated and the answer is ... after the jump!

In an attempt to scare children into good behavior around Christmas, some parents would often tell their kids that Santa would fill their stockings with coal instead of presents on Christmas morning if they were naughty. And since the kids already knew that Santa knew just about everything, this strategy sometimes worked and the parents got a couple weeks of good behavior in winter. At least, it would work until the kids realized that their parents were putting them on about Santa delivering coal. To get back at your kids for less-than-perfect behavior this holiday season (not that we're implying that they're anything less than angelic!), you could actually give them some coal - Coal Gum. The box has 2.5 ounces of sweet, but black, gum.

In Italy, where the coal-in-stockings legend got started, parents can give their kids Carbone Dolce, or "sweet coal" as a treat on Christmas. It is basically a mixture of chocolate and puffed rice cereal that is melted together and left to harden into lumps of "coal."

We already know that chewing gum can help keep your breath fresh as the springtime. Chewing gum can also help to "wash" away nasty plaque and bacteria because it causes you to salivate. Now, scientists have developed a chewing gum uses the good bacteria Lactobacillus found in yogurt to kill of the decay-causing bacteria found in your mouth.

According to Dr. Andreas Reindl of BASF, "The effectiveness has been demonstrated and the first oral hygiene products containing probiotic lactobacilli are scheduled to appear in 2007."

Of course, this doesn't mean you should stop brushing your teeth, flossing, and visiting your dentist regularly.

The Ice Breakers Ice Cubes concept is an interesting one. In the box of gum, the individual pieces look rather like little sugar cubes, slightly sparkly and not wrapped in paper. They are dubbed "ice cubes" not only for their shape, but because they almost instantly produce a cooling sensation in the mouth. As there are other types of gum that do this, I wasn't in any hurry to try these new Cubes, until I saw the "Dragonfruit Freeze" flavor.

Dragonfruit is the name for the fruits of several species of cacti which grow in Mexico, Central and South America and Southeast Asia. The fruit has a leathery rind and flesh with a texture that is somewhat similar to a firm watermelon and tastes like a slightly sweet kiwi fruit. I was hoping for the same subtlety of flavor to come through in the gum. It didn't, but the gum was still okay.

Overall, the cooling sensation is really refreshing, especially in the summer heat. The flavor is fruity and I would have been more likely to guess "tropical" or "fruit punch" than "dragonfruit." There is a definite citrus tone. It is very pleasant, and a nice change from mintier gums, but the initial taste fades very quickly. I'd buy it again, but I wouldn't make a special trip to the store to pick some up.

Jason applies chewed gum to a plywood backing to create his Gum Blonde masterpieces - portraits of blondes made with chewed up gum. According to his bio, Jason doesn't chew gum himself, but has a team who chews the gum for him, with his favorite texture coming from Trident. He does not use paint or dyes, relying on the "inherent" color of the gum, and mixing colors by chewing them.

Pretty impressive, I'd say.

How long does the flavor in your gum last? OR, for that matter, what type of gum do you chew? Lately, I've been chewing quite a bit of Orbitz and I'm pretty satisfied with how long the flavor lasts. I also chew Extra and have found that some of their flavors seem to last longer than others (the mints verses the fruits). Gum is one of the most popular "foods" items in the US, but it is probably also the most complained about. According to the vice president of Cadbury Schweppes, 66% of people feel that their gum looses flavor too quickly. So, to try to give customers what they want, Cadbury has developed a new gum, called Stride. The gum is formulated to remain soft and chewy longer, as well as to release its flavor more slowly, thus increasing the amount to time that customers are willing to chew it. An unofficial taste test in the New York Times found that it did last longer than regular gum, averaging about 20 minutes of good chewing time. The new product will hit the shelves later this month, as will a $50 million advertising campaign, so the release - just like the longer, time-release flavor of the gum itself - will probably be hard to miss.

The Wrigley gum company is on a mission to prove that gum is not something to be chewed for fun and to annoy teachers. After years of the underappreciation of the value of its products, the company has turned to science for some answers. The Wrigley Science Institute was founded to discover whether gum can actually aid in weight management, stress relief, or in boosting concentration, all claims that have been made and passed along by gum chewers over the years. If the Science Institute can find sufficient evidence, the company can then claim the health benefits of the product on the products' packaging or in ads.

Just think back to all the elemantary school teachers who told you not to chew gum in class. If the Wrigley Science Institute is right about some of their theories, those same teachers could be passing out sticks of gum before tests!

It looks like school teachers aren’t the only ones realizing that gum can be a multi-purpose vehicle. In fairness, it has been used as a non-cigarette nicotine delivery system for several years now, but the US army is putting it to more uses.

Stay Alert is a caffeinated gum developed by Wrigley’s. The cinnamon flavored gum has 100-mg of caffeine per piece, equivalent to a 6-ounce cup of coffee. Dr. Balkin, from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research isn’t worried about the possibility of abuse, though people have been known to abuse caffeinated products such as No-Doz in the past, because “the stuff doesn’t taste that good.” There are other brands of caffeinated gum that college students have been using to say alert for some time now. They include Jolt Gum – which has half as much caffeine as Stay Alert – and Penguin Energy Gum.

The army is also in the process of developing a plaque fighting gum for use by soldiers, who are sometimes unable to have regular opportunities to brush and floss due to the duties of combat. This seems like a product that the dental industry could really get behind, once it has completed testing.

Who didn’t hear the phrase “Don’t chew gum at school!” when they were growing up? Of course, this sort of instruction always encourages a few people to flout the rules and chew gum even more frequently. The main reason that gum chewing was frowned upon was that students would probably stick the used wads under the desk or on the floor, where other unsuspecting students might come into contact with them. For some reason, though, the teachers always claimed that the reason was that students couldn’t pay attention while chewing gum. This was a ridiculous excuse since people are more than capable of engaging in other activities while they chew, like walking, for example.