Manufactured chewing gum became widely available to the U.S. population in the mid-19th century. Despite the popularity of gum through the generations, it enjoys a fairly harmless record when it comes to the human digestive tract. If gum did take seven years to digest, medical imaging tests like the MRI and procedures like endoscopy and colonoscopy would routinely turn up instances of old gum hanging around. On the contrary, doctors report that when they do find gum, it’s usually because the patient failed to fast and swallowed gum directly prior to testing.
So what does happen when you swallow gum? It goes the way of just about everything else you swallow. Your swallowing action sends it into your esophagus, traveling down its length until it lands in your stomach. There it mixes with digestive juices before being emptied into your small intestine about 30 to 120 minutes later.