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Why does chewing gum get hardened after drinking water? This is a basic question, but please don't say temperature change, because I've tried that, and it never gets back to same elasticity. There must be some other chemistry at work. Even with lukewarm water or room temperature water it gets substantially harder.

Martin - マーチン
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Bhanu Chhabra
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    Related: Why does gum get harder to chew after a while? Personally, I never noticed the gum altering its hardness even when I was a kid and consumed all kinds of garbage drinks while chewing the gum. I suspect it might be a subjective matter, or an effect from a particular brand only. It would be more helpful if you could back up your observations by a statistically significant number of similar precedents described in a literature. – andselisk Apr 25 '19 at 04:56
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    Just for statistic, I have noticed the same. Consistent hardening of the chewing gum after drinking. Just not sure it is brand independent, and even flavour independent :) but I was mostly chewing mint ones :) – Alchimista Apr 25 '19 at 07:21
  • @andselisk that's too much to ask from an software engineer, but yeah, I'll try to collect some data on it from colleagues, but that won't be random sampling, so have to deal with it. And what would be the benefit of such exercise BTW? Also it seems not related as the affect discussed in question in about hardening after chewing a while, i am specifically seeking for hardening after drinking water along gum in mouth. – Bhanu Chhabra Apr 25 '19 at 13:12
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    Chewing gum can be made from quite a number of base materials, PIB, PVA, polyisoprene, mastic (arabic gum), Manilkara chicle, and many others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum has a list). I'll guess the effect (which I have also observed i think) will depend a lot on what you actually have. – Karl Apr 25 '19 at 18:10
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    @BhanuChhabra I'm not asking you to social poll. I suggested that since it might be a subjective matter, adding some data from third-party researchers would be helpful. – andselisk Apr 25 '19 at 19:42
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    As you are doing experiments, try drinking high ionic strength liquids (e.g. salt water) and non-ionic high osmolarity liquids (sugar water). No need to swallow (in fact, no need to keep the gum in your mouth). – Karsten Apr 26 '19 at 01:11
  • Well, i thought of doing so over weekend, but it seems impractical for me to gather un-biased data and opinion as the immediate access-group I've, are not so scientifically (and statistically) understanding.

    and going by the data points I need(sample size, type of gums, type of liquids), it won't be feasible for me to gather the amount of data to draw a conclusion.

     – Bhanu Chhabra Apr 29 '19 at 04:55
  • @andselisk let me search something of that nature, some research etc. – Bhanu Chhabra Apr 29 '19 at 04:57

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