system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why does gum get so tough after drinking water while chewing it?
gpt
It's not so much the water as the temperature. Basically, the long strands that make up chewing gum and give it its elastic consistency seize up when it gets cold; the water is cold enough to make the gum less elastic, which makes it much harder to chew. (A side note of this is that gum becomes much easier to get out of hair when it's cold. It's for that reason that it's often recommended to use cold water to get gum out in case of a chewing mishap, because warm or hot water will just make the gum runnier and let it spread further.)