Chew on These Gum Facts

(HealthDayNews) -- Swiss researchers from the School of Dentistry at the University of Zurich did a study of chewing gum, and here's what they found:

Worldwide, there are 560,000 tons of chewing gum sold each year, which represents 374 trillion individual sticks of gum. The retail value of all that, in 1999 U.S. dollars, is $5 trillion.

And the estimated number of hours people spend chewing gum each year: 187 trillion.