Why cant we chew food indefinitely?

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I was thinking about this yesterday while eating a juicy burger, I tried chewing as much as possible to try and keep tasting the food but at some point for some reason I couldnt do it anymore and I swallowed the bite, what gives?

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The point of chewing is to break the big piece into a bunch of little pieces, and it mixes with your saliva while that happens. Eventually it gets mashed up enough that you have a paste/mush/liquid in your mouth. There’s nothing big enough for your teeth to catch onto, so it’s like trying to chew on a milkshake

Anonymous 0 Comments

Chewing breaks up big chunks of our food and our saliva (spit) also helps the digestion process by breaking down smaller parts (starch, fats). Our taste buds are located on our tongue and (we also “taste” through smell) so once the food is broken down to such a small degree it just starts moving through our body naturally.. because our reflex is of course to swallow the food so that we don’t choke!

We can chew gum for a longer time but even that has sugar that is broken down and it will start to taste like nothing after some time