I would like to see the origin of plastics in the “natural” gums explained. Is it simply mislabeling/fraud?

Synthetic and natural rubber are polymers that break down into smaller polymer particles (usually—whether synthetic or natural—this would strictly be micro-rubbers rather than micro-plastics, but other than the former being elastic, they have pretty similar properties and issues, and micro-plastics seems frequently to be used in a way which includes rather than being distinguished from micro-rubbers.)

They mention PE/PP which I don’t think are found in natural rubber?

This article is making the rounds on news media at the moment without any attention to this, seems a bit suspicious.

I’m having a hard time conceptualizing how the plastic is shed. Do the fragments not reintegrate back into the gum bolus at the next pass/chew of the gum?

Plastic is not metal, it's a tangle of polymer subunits that get scraped off relatively easily.

Whenever you scrape a plastic container with an utensil or finger, or even just from water being poured out of a bottle, a small amount of microplastics is released, and I think we can agree that chewing is a WAY more abrasive of a process.

I don't know about pouring water but reusing disposable crumpling water bottles is the best way to get more plastic in your body

But they are all mixed together, like sand, that's why they don't separate the specific type of plastic but use a generic "microplastics”

“Mixed together like sand” ?

Sand is a bunch of tiny bits of a variety of things - we usually don't say micro-silica, micro-quartz, micro-etc and just bundle it together and describe the group as sand (unless explicitly trying to talk about an individual piece).

...and wouldn't that actually be problematic in health-related research?

I mean, it seems like saying copper/iron/titanium/lead are all "metal"

I'm not surprised as it's really just plastic that you're chewing these days. The original natural variants are way too expensive.

The article mentions there was no difference between synthetic and natural gums in terms of microplastics released.

Somebody should just sell reused tire scraps as chewing gum replacements. The artificial substitutes are still much too expensive