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 have a habit of eating mostly on one side, but I try to switch it up a bit. Sometimes I’m alternating sides during chewing a mouthful.
Consciously, I swallow to do it in one go. But without me doing anything, food seems to just go down the throat bit by bit during chewing.
I’m not really sure where the tongue goes. It’s kind of constantly moving, pushing food towards one side, pushing it toward the other side. Etc.
Chewing motion is up and down AND side to side. It’s kind of like rolling your jaw in a circle. Biting helps with crunching and breaking the food, and grinding helps with breaking it down. So it’s a mix of both.
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