Health Wanted: Gambling

The Episode

The topic: Gambling is no longer limited to Vegas casinos—today, it is as easy as a few taps on a mobile device. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Rachel Volberg, PhD, discuss the rise in problem gambling and why it is a public health issue.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW

The takeaway: Gambling addiction has always existed in the U.S., but rates are rising due to the expanded access and legality of online sports betting. Sports betting encourages more impulsive decisions and leads to financial loss, which affects public health.

• Before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could decide whether or not to legalize sports betting in 2018, it was only legal in Nevada. Now, 39 states allow online or in-person sports betting. Today, it is easy to engage in sports betting through phones and the internet, making it more accessible than ever before. In 2024 alone, people in the U.S. spent almost $150 billion on sports wagers.
• There are clear parallels between Big Tobacco and online gambling companies. Both rely on flashy advertising to attract new customers, succeed through keeping people hooked on their product, and prioritize making money over the health and well-being of their consumers.
• The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that 6.5 to 8.5 million U.S. adults have mild to severe gambling addictions. And it impacts more than individuals; families, partners, coworkers, and communities are affected as well. Young men are of particular concern; a survey commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association found that 58% of 18 to 22-year-olds engaged in sports betting in the last year. Currently, 10% of young men show signs of a gambling addiction, which is more than three times the rate in the general population.
• One increasingly popular and risky type of bet is the parlay, a type of wager that depends on multiple predictions being correct, like what team wins the game, and what color sports drink the players consume, and whether a certain celebrity decides to attend. The payout potential for this type of bet is high, but the odds of winning are very low, making parlays especially appealing for impulse bets. One platform found that parlays made up 70% of all National Football League and National Basketball Association bets for the company in 2023.

The Interview

The guest: Rachel Volberg, PhD

The key takeaways:

• Taking a public health approach to gambling shifts the focus away from individual responsibility alone and considers the design and accessibility of gambling products themselves. It acknowledges the interaction between individuals and inherently risky products, rather than placing the entire burden on personal choice or willpower.
• Certain popular behaviors among kids and teenagers mirror gambling activities; for example, buying “blind box” items, where a type of toy or content is unknown until you pay for it and open it. This process closely resembles gambling and may normalize risky behavior at an early age. Research shows that the earlier someone begins gambling, the greater the risk of developing gambling problems later in life, which makes these trends concerning.
• While gambling does create some state revenue through taxation, most of the money spent goes to private companies that have no connection to the local economy. This money could otherwise have been saved, invested, or spent in a way that benefited local communities more directly.
• Problematic gambling behaviors can begin well before someone meets the threshold for a clinical diagnosis. If you gamble, consider establishing practical harm-reduction strategies like deposit or spending limits, and restricting time spent on gambling apps and websites.

The Listener Questions

Does COVID-19 cause brain damage?

A recent paper discusses the possibility of brain damage from COVID-19, but there are quite a few caveats to think through first.

There is a potential impact that COVID-19 has on brain function. Doctors and researchers see a lot of neurological symptoms in people who suffer from long COVID, but this paper is, if anything, a hypothesis-generating paper. We need much more research to get meaningful information.

The paper shows brain scans from people who recovered from COVID-19 and showed that some areas of the brain were smaller or more damaged compared to those areas in people who did not have COVID-19. The damage was worse in people who were sick enough to require hospitalization.

However, this paper is not yet peer reviewed. There is no indication of when this study was conducted or when participants were recruited. This is important because, if they were recruiting people earlier on in the pandemic, there’s a much higher likelihood that the people who say they had never had COVID-19 have truly never had COVID-19, compared to people potentially recruited in 2024 who may have had an asymptomatic case.

The paper also relies on people’s self-reported history of COVID-19 and doesn’t check for antibodies in the blood. It’s highly likely some of the “healthy controls” actually had an infection they were unaware of.

There also aren’t any baseline brain scans to compare to, so you can’t definitively say that any differences are the result of COVID-19 rather than underlying health issues that happened before COVID-19.

Finally, any differences that were noted barely reached statistical significance, so those differences might just be due to chance.

Certainly, not getting COVID-19 is a way better plan than getting COVID-19, and we need a better understanding of what COVID-19 does to the body so that we can understand how to prevent and treat complications like long COVID. However, this particular paper does not currently prove that there is a significant risk of brain damage.

Does chewing gum release microplastics into my mouth?

A recent study presented at a conference looked into whether gum releases microplastics. They also wanted to determine if “natural” or “synthetic” released more microplastics.

The chewiness of gum comes from polymers, which can be natural or synthetic. Natural gums use plant-based polymers, and synthetic gums use petroleum-based polymers. Both released a fair amount of microplastics: about 100 microplastics per gram of gum, with some releasing up to 600 microplastics. There was no significant difference in the amounts between natural and synthetic polymers in gum.

The study design was really limited, as it was one person chewing 10 types of gum (five natural and five synthetic).

If you combine that with the fact that we don’t know how dangerous these particular microplastics are to people, it’s probably not enough data to warrant throwing out all of your supply. There are other, more definite ways people can reduce their overall exposure to microplastics, like not using plastic food containers.

An interesting observation from the study was that 94% of the microplastics that were released came out within the first eight minutes of chewing. So, if you want to reduce your gum-specific microplastic consumption, you could chew one piece longer rather than switching to a new piece.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

• Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
• Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
• Watching on WABE's YouTube channel