You came for the xylitol answer, and for 5 Gum it is no on all nine labels. Ours is yes, first on the list, next to 5.7 mg of nano-hydroxyapatite per 1.9 g piece, printed on the box rather than left to a proprietary blend. One piece a day, chewed at least 20 minutes after eating, with the full ingredient list and the batch certificate published so you can run this same label check on us. We do not carry the ADA Seal either, which matters if the Seal is your check, and no gum on this page replaces fluoride brushing.

At a glance

Every 5 Gum label we read, flavor by flavor

All nine ingredient statements captured from the raw HTML of the 5gum.com product pages on 5 September 2026, enumerated from the site's sitemap. HSH is hydrogenated starch hydrolysate. Every page gives the same nutrition panel per 2.5 g stick: 5 calories, 0 g total sugars, 2 g sugar alcohol, plus the line "PHENYLKETONURICS: CONTAINS PHENYLALANINE." Xylitol: absent from all nine. Fluoride, calcium, phosphate, hydroxyapatite or any whitening agent: absent from all nine. Formulations change; the pack in your hand is the label that counts.

Part 1

What is in a stick of 5 Gum, read in label order

Here is the Peppermint Cobalt statement as the 5gum.com page carries it: "Sorbitol, Gum Base, Glycerol, Natural And Artificial Flavors; Less Than 2% Of: Hydrogenated Starch Hydrolysate, Aspartame, Mannitol, Acesulfame K, Soy Lecithin, Color (Blue 1 Lake), Bht (To Maintain Freshness)." US labels list ingredients in descending order by weight, and everything after "less than 2% of" can appear in any order, so the statement splits into a body, which tells you what the stick is mostly made of, and a tail, which tells you what is in it in small amounts without saying how small. The body of a 5 Gum stick is four items long: sorbitol, gum base, glycerol, flavors. The tail runs from six items on Wintermint Ascent to eleven on Watermelon Prism and Strawberry Flood, counting each named color.

Read across all nine flavors and the pattern barely moves. Sorbitol is first on every one. Gum base is second on every one. Glycerol is third on every one. After that the mint flavors and the fruit flavors part ways in small, tellable details. Strawberry Flood pushes its "Natural And Artificial Flavors" below the 2% line, the only flavor to do so, which by the labeling convention puts the flavoring under 2 percent of the stick, where on the other eight it sits above that line. Sour Sweet Berry Evolution lifts mannitol above the line, making it the only flavor with a second polyol above the line, and it is also the only flavor that adds sucralose to the sweetener tail. Watermelon Prism and Strawberry Flood carry citric and malic acid for the sour note, and Watermelon Prism adds fumaric acid on top. Everything else is shared.

The nutrition panel is identical on all nine pages: one stick, 2.5 g, 15 servings per pack, 5 calories, 0 g fat, 0 g sodium, 2 g total carbohydrate, 0 g total sugars, 2 g sugar alcohol, 0 g protein. Two grams of sugar alcohol in a two-and-a-half-gram stick means that, by the panel's own numbers, four fifths of what you put in your mouth is polyol, sorbitol first, hydrogenated starch hydrolysate and mannitol behind it. The gum base, the glycerol, the flavors, the sweeteners, the color and the antioxidant share the remaining half gram. That arithmetic is ours, but the two figures it rests on are Mars Wrigley's.

One more line sits under every panel in capital letters: "PHENYLKETONURICS: CONTAINS PHENYLALANINE." That is not a Mars flourish. Under 21 CFR 172.804 any food that contains aspartame must display that statement prominently, because aspartame breaks down into phenylalanine, which people with the inherited condition phenylketonuria cannot metabolize. Its presence on every 5 Gum page is simply the label doing what the regulation requires, and it is the quickest way to confirm, before you find the word in the tail, that the stick is aspartame-sweetened. Mentos gum gets the same label read in our Mentos ingredients review.

What the label does not carry is also worth listing, because a surprising share of the questions people ask about this gum assume things that are not there. No 5 Gum statement lists xylitol. None lists fluoride, calcium, phosphate, hydroxyapatite or any ingredient that a whitening claim could rest on. None of the nine product pages makes a claim about teeth, cavities, whitening or the ADA; the copy on 5gum.com, as captured on 5 September 2026, is about flavor and "taking chances", not dentistry. That silence is honest. 5 Gum is sold as a flavor experience, and its label is the label of a flavor product.

Part 2

Ingredient by ingredient, what each one is and does

Sorbitol. A sugar alcohol, or polyol, and the bulk of the stick. The FDA lists it as generally recognized as safe under 21 CFR 184.1835, with one condition that matters for gum: a label statement about a possible laxative effect is required when foreseeable consumption could reach 50 g a day. At 2 g of sugar alcohol per stick, that threshold sits at 25 sticks in a day, which is more than a 15-stick pack and a half. Dentally, sorbitol is not fermented into acid by plaque bacteria the way sugar is, which is the whole reason sugar-free gum is sugar-free gum. What sorbitol is not is xylitol, and the difference shows up in the research; Part 4 covers that, and our sorbitol versus xylitol deep dive goes further.

Gum base. The chewable part, listed as a single phrase because US labeling allows the base to be declared collectively. Mars Wrigley does not break the 5 Gum base down on any page we read, so we cannot tell you what elastomers, resins, waxes or softeners it contains, and neither can anyone else reading the pack. What we can say is that the base is the only ingredient on the label whose composition is undisclosed by design rather than by omission.

Glycerol. Third on every flavor. A humectant and softener that keeps the stick from drying out and going brittle in the pack. No dental significance we know of.

Natural and artificial flavors. Above the line on eight flavors, below it on Strawberry Flood. The phrase is a category, not an ingredient, and US law does not require the individual compounds to be named. 5 Gum's whole proposition lives here, and it is the one part of the label where you should expect no further detail from any brand.

Hydrogenated starch hydrolysate. First in the tail on all nine flavors. A mixture of polyols made by hydrolyzing starch and hydrogenating the result; it shows up on labels as HSH. Like sorbitol it is a sugar alcohol, counts toward the 2 g on the panel, and is not fermented to acid by plaque bacteria.

Aspartame. In the tail on all nine flavors, and the reason for the capitalized phenylalanine line. The FDA approved it as a general-purpose sweetener in 1996 and sets an acceptable daily intake of 50 mg per kilogram of body weight per day. Because it sits under the 2% line in a 2.5 g stick, a single stick carries under 50 mg of aspartame at the very most, and in practice a good deal less, since it shares that 2% with five or more other tail ingredients. The World Health Organization's 2023 example puts 200 to 300 mg in one can of diet soft drink. Part 6 walks through what the IARC, JECFA, FDA and EFSA each concluded about it, and our aspartame in chewing gum article goes deeper than this page has room for.

Mannitol. A third polyol, in the tail on eight flavors and above the line on Sour Sweet Berry Evolution. Used for texture as much as for sweetness, and, like the other two, a sugar alcohol rather than a sugar.

Acesulfame K. A high-intensity sweetener paired with aspartame on all nine flavors; Sour Sweet Berry Evolution spells it out as acesulfame potassium, which is the same compound. The FDA's acceptable daily intake is 15 mg per kilogram of body weight per day. It is not metabolized by plaque bacteria and has no dental effect of its own that the sources we read describe.

Sucralose. On one flavor only, Sour Sweet Berry Evolution, where it sits at the end of the sweetener tail after aspartame and acesulfame potassium. The other eight flavors do not list it.

Soy lecithin. An emulsifier, on all nine flavors, that helps the flavor oils and the base hold together. It is the only soy-derived item on the label, which matters if soy is something you avoid.

The colors. Six of the nine flavors list at least one. Peppermint Cobalt and Sweet Mint use Blue 1 Lake; Spearmint Rain adds Yellow 5 Lake to Blue 1 Lake; Watermelon Prism and Strawberry Flood use Red 40 and Red 40 Lake; React Mint stacks Blue 2 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake and Red 40 Lake. A "lake" is a dye bound to an insoluble substrate so it colors the solid stick rather than dissolving out of it. Wintermint Ascent, RPM Mint and Sour Sweet Berry Evolution list no color at all. None of the nine lists titanium dioxide, carmine or any pigment beyond the numbered colors named.

BHT, "to maintain freshness". Butylated hydroxytoluene, a synthetic antioxidant, last on every one of the nine labels. It is there to stop the fats and flavor oils in the base from going rancid. Under 21 CFR 172.615 the total antioxidant content in chewing gum base may not exceed 0.1 percent when BHT is used alone or in combination with BHA. EFSA's 2012 re-evaluation of BHT as food additive E 321 set an acceptable daily intake of 0.25 mg per kilogram of body weight per day. No 5 Gum page states how much BHT a stick contains, and the same is true of Extra and Orbit.

Citric, malic and fumaric acid. The sour note in the fruit flavors: citric and malic on Watermelon Prism, Strawberry Flood and Sour Sweet Berry Evolution, fumaric on Watermelon Prism as well. They are food acids, and they are the one part of a fruit-flavored sugar-free gum that a dentist might raise an eyebrow at, because acid is acid regardless of where the sugar went. The 5 Gum pages do not quantify them, and we have no figure to offer either; we note only that the six mint flavors list none.

Part 3

Is 5 Gum really sugar-free, and what does that word buy you?

Yes, by the panel and by the ingredient statement. Total sugars: 0 g. No sucrose, glucose, dextrose, corn syrup or any other sugar appears on any of the nine labels. The 2 g of carbohydrate per stick is entirely sugar alcohol, which the panel reports on its own line precisely so that the "0 g total sugars" figure is not misread. People sometimes see "2 g total carb" and "sugar-free" on the same panel and assume a contradiction; there is none. Polyols are carbohydrates that plaque bacteria cannot ferment into acid, which is the property that makes a gum sugar-free in the sense that matters for enamel.

What "sugar-free" earns a gum, in regulatory terms, is specific and modest. In the European Union, Regulation 432/2012 authorizes two health claims for sugar-free chewing gum: that it "contributes to the maintenance of tooth mineralisation" and that it contributes to "neutralisation of plaque acids", each conditioned on chewing for at least 20 minutes after eating or drinking. The claim belongs to the category, not to a brand; any sugar-free gum can carry it in the EU provided it meets the conditions. In the United States, the American Dental Association's chewing gum topic page, updated 4 May 2023, says that chewing raises salivary flow to 10 to 12 times the unstimulated rate and, in the same breath, that gum is "not to be used as a substitute for a regular oral hygiene routine".

That saliva mechanism is the whole scientific case for sugar-free gum, and it deserves a paragraph of its own because it is the case for 5 Gum too. A 2015 review of saliva's functions by Dawes and colleagues, sponsored by the World Workshop on Oral Medicine VI (Arch Oral Biol, PMID 25841068), lays out what stimulated saliva does: it buffers acid, it clears food and bacteria, it lubricates, and it carries the calcium and phosphate that enamel exchanges with its surroundings. A 2007 systematic review by Mickenautsch and colleagues (J Appl Oral Sci, PMID 19089107) found that seven of nine included studies reported anti-cariogenic effects of sugar-free gum, and attributed them to "saliva stimulation through the chewing process" and to "the inability of bacteria to metabolize polyols into acids". Both of those effects apply to a sorbitol stick exactly as they apply to a xylitol one. Chewing 5 Gum for 20 minutes after lunch is doing the thing the ADA and the EU register describe.

The one caution that comes with polyols is digestive, not dental. Sorbitol's GRAS listing requires a laxative-effect statement on foods where 50 g a day is a foreseeable intake, and the arithmetic for a stick gum is plain: at 2 g of sugar alcohol per stick you would need 25 sticks in a day to reach it. Someone chewing through a pack and a half daily might notice; someone chewing a stick after meals will not. As with every figure on this page, the 50 g and the 2 g are the regulator's and the brand's respectively, and the 25 is ours.

Part 4

Does 5 Gum have xylitol, and why people keep asking

No. We looked for the word on all nine ingredient statements, in the body and in the tail, and it is not there. That is not unusual for a Mars Wrigley stick gum; the standard Extra line is xylitol-free as well. It is a real difference from Orbit, which lists xylitol in its under-2% tail, and from Orbit White, which lists it first. The question comes up so often ("ingredients of 5 gum" is searched roughly 880 times a month in the United States, per the keyword data we pulled on 5 September 2026) because xylitol is the one gum ingredient people have heard has a dental study behind it, and 5 Gum's pack does not say either way.

Why does the polyol matter, if every sugar-free gum gets the saliva effect? Because the trials that compared them found a difference in size. The 2008 systematic review by Deshpande and Jadad in the Journal of the American Dental Association (PMID 19047666) pooled randomized controlled trials of polyol gums and reported the prevented fraction, the share of new cavities avoided compared with chewing no gum, by polyol: 58.66 percent for xylitol gum, 52.82 percent for xylitol-sorbitol blends, and 20.01 percent for sorbitol-only gum. Every 5 Gum flavor is, by its label, a sorbitol gum with hydrogenated starch hydrolysate and mannitol behind it, which puts it in the group with the smallest measured effect in that review. Not zero; the sorbitol trials still came out ahead of no gum. Smallest.

Two cautions keep that finding honest. First, the 2015 Cochrane review by Riley and colleagues (PMID 25809586), which looked at xylitol-containing products across ten studies and 5,903 participants, rated the evidence for xylitol products other than toothpaste as insufficient or of low quality. The xylitol advantage is real in the trials that exist and the trials that exist are not many, and both halves of that sentence are true at once. Second, a 2021 meta-analysis by Nasseripour and colleagues in BMC Oral Health (PMID 33926448) found that sugar-free gum reduced the load of Streptococcus mutans, the bacterium most associated with cavities, but twelve of its thirteen included trials used xylitol gum, so the bacterial finding does not transfer cleanly to a sorbitol stick. When someone tells you "studies show sugar-free gum cuts cavity bacteria", the studies they mean were mostly not about the gum 5 Gum is.

So the fair summary is this. 5 Gum gets the mechanism the whole category gets, saliva stimulation and no fermentable sugar. It does not get the ingredient that the better-studied trials used, and its label does not claim to. If xylitol is what you are after, the brands that list it are easy to find and the brands that quantify it are fewer still; our ranking of xylitol gums by published dose lists the ones we could verify, and Part 8 of this page puts three of them in a table.

Part 5

Is 5 Gum ADA approved? What the Seal guide lists

The American Dental Association's Seal of Acceptance is granted per product, and the ADA publishes a reference guide that lists every product holding it. The edition marked "Updated: October 2025", extracted on 5 September 2026, carries eight chewing gum entries, and here they are verbatim so you can check the list against any pack: Bazooka Sugar Free Bubble Gum (Original); Ice Breakers Ice Cubes Sugar Free Chewing Gum; Mentos Gum Pure Fresh (Spearmint, Fresh Mint); Mentos Pure White Gum (Sweetmint); Orbit Sugarfree Gum; Orbit White Sugarfree Gum (Peppermint, Spearmint); quip Sugarfree Chewing Gum; Trident Sugarfree Gum. 5 Gum is not on it. Extra is not on it either.

We checked the absence three ways rather than one, because an absence claim deserves more than a single search. The ADA Seal chairside guide, marked "Updated: August 2023", does not list 5 Gum. A site search on ada.org on 5 September 2026 returned nothing for it. And none of the nine 5gum.com product pages shows a Seal graphic or makes a Seal claim. As of the date at the top of this article, then, 5 Gum does not appear in the ADA's current Seal reference guide, chairside guide or site search, while its sibling Orbit, made by the same company, does.

Why not, and what the Seal would and would not say

We do not know why, and we are not going to guess. No Mars statement and no ADA statement we could find explains why one Mars Wrigley stick gum holds the Seal and another does not, and the possibilities, from a simple decision not to apply to a formulation difference, are not ours to rank. What we can say is what the Seal means for the gums that do hold it. The ADA's own chewing gum page describes the basis: sugar-free gum chewed after eating stimulates saliva, which raises flow to 10 to 12 times the resting rate and helps neutralize and clear plaque acids. That is a statement about sugar-free chewing, which 5 Gum also is. The Seal's absence does not mean 5 Gum fails to stimulate saliva; it means the ADA has not evaluated and accepted this particular product, and the pack cannot say that it has.

One practical note. The Seal reference guide is updated periodically and products are added and dropped. If you are reading this months after the date at the top, the current guide on ada.org is the document to check, not this page. We will re-read it on our next review and change the sentence above if the list changes.

Part 6

Is 5 Gum bad for you? The regulator record, sweetener by sweetener

This is the question the searches circle, and the honest answer is a set of records rather than a verdict. The ingredients on the 5 Gum label that people worry about are aspartame, acesulfame K, BHT and the colors. Each has a regulator file, and each file has a number in it. Here they are, with the sources dated, so that you can weigh them yourself rather than take our word or anyone else's.

Aspartame, the three-agency version. On 14 July 2023 the World Health Organization released two assessments at once. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified aspartame as "possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B)", on what it called limited evidence. The Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, in the same release, reaffirmed the acceptable daily intake of 0 to 40 mg per kilogram of body weight and illustrated it: an adult weighing 70 kg would need to drink "more than 9 to 14 cans per day" of a diet soft drink containing 200 or 300 mg of aspartame to exceed it. The US Food and Drug Administration's page on aspartame and other sweeteners, dated 27 February 2025, gives its own acceptable daily intake of 50 mg per kilogram per day and says, in its words, that aspartame "being labeled by IARC as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans' does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer." The European Food Safety Authority's 2013 assessment concluded that aspartame and its breakdown products are safe for the general population at the current 40 mg per kilogram ADI.

Now the stick. Aspartame is in the under-2% tail of a 2.5 g stick, which caps it below 50 mg per stick before it has shared that 2% with the five to ten other tail ingredients around it. Set against the WHO's own example of 200 to 300 mg in a single can, a stick of 5 Gum is a small fraction of a can, and a 70 kg adult's 40 mg per kg ADI is 2,800 mg a day. We are not telling you aspartame is nothing to think about; the IARC listing is real and the FDA's sentence about it is also real. We are telling you what the numbers are so that the thinking is yours. The longer aspartame article on this blog goes through the trials behind each agency's position.

Acesulfame K. The FDA's acceptable daily intake is 15 mg per kilogram of body weight per day, per the same 27 February 2025 page. It shares the under-2% tail with aspartame on all nine flavors, so the same order-of-magnitude arithmetic applies. It is not fermented by plaque bacteria and has no dental effect the sources we read describe.

BHT. Permitted in chewing gum base under 21 CFR 172.615 at a total antioxidant content not exceeding 0.1 percent of the base. EFSA's 2012 re-evaluation of E 321 set an acceptable daily intake of 0.25 mg per kilogram of body weight per day. BHT is last on all nine 5 Gum labels, and last on the Extra and Orbit labels too; no brand in this family publishes a per-stick figure for it. If you would rather chew a gum without it, the label makes that easy to check and the alternatives table in Part 8 lists one option that does not carry it.

The colors. Blue 1, Blue 2, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and Red 40, in dye or lake form, are the colors the labels name. Six of the nine 5 Gum flavors use at least one; three list none. If you want to avoid them, Wintermint Ascent, RPM Mint and Sour Sweet Berry Evolution are the three labels on 5gum.com without a color entry as of 5 September 2026.

The phenylalanine line. If you or someone in your household has phenylketonuria, the capitalized statement on every 5 Gum pack is the one that matters, and it is there because 21 CFR 172.804 requires it wherever aspartame is used. That is a hard exclusion for a small group of people and a non-issue for everyone else.

Teeth, specifically. Nothing on the 5 Gum label is a sugar, so nothing in the stick feeds acid-producing plaque bacteria. The six mint flavors carry no food acid; Watermelon Prism, Strawberry Flood and Sour Sweet Berry Evolution carry citric and malic acid, and Watermelon Prism fumaric acid too, for the sour note. The pages do not quantify those acids, so we cannot tell you how much a stick delivers, only that the mint labels avoid the question entirely. Chewing any of the nine for 20 minutes after eating stimulates the saliva that the ADA and the EU claim register credit. What the label does not add is xylitol, fluoride, calcium, phosphate or any mineral, and no 5gum.com page claims it does.

Put together: we found nothing on the 5 Gum label that sits outside its regulator's authorized use, and nothing on a 5gum.com page that claims a dental benefit the label cannot support. Whether the tail is a list you are happy to chew is a preference you hold, and the label is clear enough to let you hold it.

Part 7

5 Gum vs Extra vs Orbit, three labels from one company

All three carry the same footer on their websites, "©2026 Mars or Affiliates ... An Affiliate of Mars, Incorporated", and all three peppermint sticks were read on the same day. The table lines them up.

All three product pages read on 5 September 2026. Brand shop pages are not linked from this blog. Extra and Orbit each have their own label check on this site, linked below.

Read as a family, the three labels tell a simple story. 5 Gum and Extra are, by their sticks' nutrition panels and ingredient statements, the same product class: 2.5 g, 5 calories, 2 g sugar alcohol, sorbitol first, aspartame and acesulfame K, BHT, no xylitol. What separates them is flavor, format and marketing. Orbit is the sibling that diverges: half the sugar alcohol per piece, xylitol in the tail, and the ADA Seal on both its regular and its White line. If the question in your head is "which Mars Wrigley gum has xylitol", the answer on the current labels is Orbit, not 5 Gum and not Extra. Our Extra label check and Orbit label check read each of those lines flavor by flavor the way this page reads 5 Gum, and the Trident White review covers the Seal-holding competitor from outside the Mars family.

Part 8

If you want a published xylitol dose, these labels give one

The gap this page keeps circling is not a bad ingredient; it is a missing one, and a missing number. Here are the gums we know of that list xylitol and say how much, with the three Mars Wrigley sticks in the same table for contrast, each figure taken from the brand's own page or a retailer panel on 5 September 2026.

Epic and Spry figures as published by the brand or a retailer panel on 5 September 2026; their full ingredient lists are covered in our separate reviews. Minvelle figures from the transparency page on the same date. Brand shop pages are not linked from this blog.

Fairness, and our conflict

We sell the second row of that table, and every switch from 5 Gum to Minvelle is money in our pocket, so here is the case for 5 Gum made as plainly as we made the case against. It is sugar-free in every sense that matters for enamel. It is a 5-calorie stick with nine flavors, three of them without any color, and its label is clear, complete and consistent across all nine pages we read. Everything in its tail is an authorized additive with a published acceptable daily intake or a published use limit, and a single stick sits far below every one of those numbers. It makes no dental claim it cannot support; in fact it makes none at all. And the mechanism the ADA and the EU claim register credit to sugar-free gum, saliva stimulation over 20 minutes of chewing, works in a 5 Gum stick exactly as it works in a gum that costs more and says more. A person who chews 5 Gum after every meal is doing more for their teeth than a person who bought a dental gum and left it in a drawer.

The case for the published-dose brands is narrower and we should state it narrowly. If you have read the polyol research and want the ingredient that came out ahead in it, 5 Gum's label does not contain it and Orbit's does not quantify it, so the choice narrows to labels that print a xylitol figure. If you want a gum without aspartame, acesulfame K, sorbitol or BHT, the 5 Gum label rules 5 Gum out and the Minvelle ingredient list rules Minvelle in, but that is a preference you hold, not a finding we made. And if you want a mineral in the gum rather than the saliva effect alone, Minvelle's 5.7 mg of nano-hydroxyapatite per piece is a published dose of a studied ingredient, with, as our own transparency page says, no finished-product trial behind the gum itself. We hold ourselves to the same sentence we hold 5 Gum to: what does the label say, and what does the brand publish. Our hydroxyapatite gum database applies that sentence to every brand in the category, including the ones that beat us on it.

Part 9

How to read the pack in your hand, in thirty seconds

Because formulations change and this page is dated, here is the method rather than the conclusion, so you can repeat it on any pack of 5 Gum, or of anything else. Find the first ingredient: on 5 Gum it is sorbitol, and a sorbitol-first gum is a standard sugar-free stick, not a xylitol gum, whatever the front says. Find the semicolon: everything after "less than 2% of" is small and unquantified, and that is where aspartame, acesulfame K, BHT and the color live on 5 Gum. Find the capitalized phenylalanine line: if it is there, the gum is aspartame-sweetened, and it is there on every 5 Gum pack. Find "total sugars" on the panel: 0 g means the plaque bacteria have nothing to ferment, and 5 Gum reads 0 g. Look for a word that is not there: xylitol, fluoride, calcium, phosphate, hydroxyapatite. On 5 Gum, none of them is. Then check whether the brand publishes an amount for anything beyond the panel. On 5 Gum, it does not, and, to be fair to Mars Wrigley, neither do the other mass-market labels we have read.

That is the entire label check, and it fits on the back of the pack because that is where it came from.

Questions, answered

The things people actually ask about 5 Gum