[Medication] How come we can eat hard foods like cookies, vegetables etc with no issue swallowing, but swallowing a pill is genuinely difficult for most of us?

Question

Im currently taking vitamin extras, and i’ve noticed that swallowing the tablet itself takes me a couple of seconds of “mental preparation” before commiting to it, yet any other hard item can be swallowed with easy and no thought to it.

In: 4

Answer 1

Generally when you eat, you chew stuff into much smaller pieces. When taking a pill, you have to swallow it whole. If you were to only break your food in to pill-sizes chunks, you’d find it similarly difficult. The other factor is that pills are very dry, which adds to the difficulty. Food has usually got some moisture. So, if you really wanted to compare food and pills, you’d have to take some dry crackers, cut them into pieces the size of pills, and try and swallow them.