Let’s say you’re having lunch with a friend of yours, and when you take a bite of your sandwich and swallow, you start to cough uncontrollably. You manage to drink some water and get it under control and your friend explains to you that your sandwich “went down the wrong way”. What do they mean by this and what actually happens when this occurs?
In: Biology
Literally exactly that. The tube that goes from your mouth to your stomach and the tube that goes from your nose/mouth to your lungs are the same tube for the first bit. There’s a little flap of muscle called the epiglottis that’s supposed to close the hatch to your lungs while you eat so you don’t get food in your lungs. Alas, it doesn’t always do its job very well, and sometimes food goes down the lung pipe instead of the stomach pipe, and you have to cough to get the food out of your airway.
Remember kids: evolution doesn’t produce the *best* organisms, it produces the *good enoughest* organisms
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