A new study sought to analyze the chewing nature of four types of gum bases and along the way determine bubbling capacity also. Gums are generally oils, resins, and elastomers generally held in pleasant form by the gum base. 

So gum base is important to manufacturers. Chewing gum is a $25 billion per year business, 1,740,000,000,000 sticks. If humans chew each stick for 10 minutes, that is over 33,000,000 years we spend at it - annually. 

Companies want to optimize it for their customers. If it is a bubble gum, people want it to be chewed fast enough they can put on a show, but still last for a while, so the amount of gum base will be lower, around 15 to 20 percent, than a sugary chewing gum, which will be around 25 percent gum base and sugar-free chewing gum, the most popular kind among adults unless you are someone who thinks aspartame and cell phones cause cancer, will be up to 30 percent.



It doesn't just matter for blowing bubbles or fresher breath, because gums are an effective way to provide bioactive compounds like flavonoids, choline, phytoestrogens, and coenzyme Q. The benefits of chewing gum are pretty well established (oral health, stress, and most recently, to mitigate risk of COVID-19) and the jury is still out on how well phenolic compounds in tea, olive oil, or fruits make a difference, we need more than epidemiological correlation to endorse them, but companies want to sell them and if enough buy them and the evidence goes beyond gimmicky statistical significance and into real weight of evidence the way oral health and sugar-free gum has been settled, then it will move into the science category and be possible for medicines.

Even the military has been quietly funding development of healthy gum, to compound with its stress-relief benefits.

The desire to add new health benefits adds a new layer of need for optimizing taste, mouth feel, and gum endurance - if you want to include a bioactive, you need to make sure it is being chewed long enough to become bioavailable. The results were that the rate of deformation increases towards the nonlinear region, Samples were provided by the Maykim Gum Base Company, who are behind products like Bazooka and many others. They found the first to lose its elliptical shape was 213. No surprise as that has no bubble-forming properties, but also why it is a good choice for lasting long.

What might all that mean for the future? It is unclear. Most of that $25 billion business is entertainment - "candy" - and the dominant players don't want to introduce the FDA into their revenue for good reason. The supplement market is generally too sketchy to be trusted. That leaves gum in a bit of a gray area until smaller studies like this show it can be workable enough that a pharmaceutical company gets interested for something like vaccines.