Long time mouth breather, first time poster to ELI5.
I’m in my late 30s, and I realise l’ve been chewing and swallowing food wrong my whole life, and am bugging the heck out of my loved ones with questions… but I still need answers, so please take a moment to help me out.
When you chew food, do you use both sides of your mouth equally?
Do you swallow an entire mouthful’s worth of food in one go? Or does it slide down your throat bit by bit as you are chewing?
Where does your tongue go while you’re chewing?
Do you chew up and down or kind of grindy side to side?
I know I sound like an alien or an Al but I’m just an undiagnosed tongue tie kid with a weirdly high palate whose tongue has been hanging about the bottom of my mouth like a slug for the last few decades.
In: Biology
I notice that my mouth favors savory foods on the left and sweet/sour foods on the right, so those are the molars I tend to use while chewing depending on the food. My tongue moves the food around my mouth so I get all the taste sensations.
>Do you swallow an entire mouthful’s worth of food in one go? Or does it slide down your throat bit by bit as you are chewing?
“Mouthful” is kind of vague. I only put in my mouth maybe a teaspoon of food at the most at a time and chew until it’s ground into mush, swallow and repeat. For me, that’s a “mouthful”. I don’t load my mouth with as much food as it can hold. Part of the chewing and grinding process is to mix the food with saliva so it slides easily down my throat.
>Do you chew up and down or kind of grindy side to side?
Some of both. I chew straight down to break up bigger stuff. Like a large crouton in a salad, I’ll crush it up/down, then pulpify it by more crushing and grinding.
>tongue tie kid with a weirdly high palate
You may have more “work space” than the average person, so can fill your mouth with more food and it’s still “workable” because you have room for your teeth to grind it and for your saliva to mix with it. However, the general pattern is to put a spoon or forkful of food in your mouth, chew, and swallow. It’s never to put multiple spoonfuls in your mouth, or to put so much it takes multiple chew/swallow cycles to clear the food out of your mouth. Each time you open your mouth, there should be a chew followed by a swallow, and then it’s on to the next spoonful.
>tongue has been hanging about the bottom of my mouth like a slug
This sounds odd. When most people eat, their tongue moves around to better taste the food. Do you not move your tongue when eating?
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