So I was with friends chilling and this girl brought popsicles for everybody, and as I finished I was staring at the flat stick and has this idea to try and chew with two of them pushing my cheek outwards to see if it was possible to use only the tongue and the jaw sideways movements to move the food around my mouth.
I brought the stick home with me, bought another popsicle on the way to try and test it out.
Well... didn't work out. Realized the cheek is the thing that moves the food inwards towards the mouth while the tongue moves it outwards. Combined with the jaw sideways movement this is how food is moved and balanced inside the mouth to fit between the teeth to be crushed.
Probably the reason horses have jaws with incredible range of motion, because they don't have cheeks to move the food back inwards so the jaw does this job for them.
I have no issue using just my jaw movement and tongue to move food around. Cheeks hold it there for me but not much beyond that.
But have you attempted completely isolating the cheeks during chewing to test it out? pushing it outwards with your fingers or something, like if they were never there?
you may be onto something actually; apologies.
when I push my cheek outwards from within with a finger and I do a bite or chewing motion, I can isolate the cheeks and not use them at all, but when I think to do a motion to pull food into my bite area from my cheeks, they very firmly and tautly pull in which is clearly buccinator usage. for the record, I exclusively do the adult i.e non-infantile swallow so I do not have developed cheek muscles from doing the sucking motion when eating food.
I wonder if adults are meant to use their buccinators like this or not.. it's very practical and effective for pushing food back into the bite zone, but if we want to atrophy the buccinators/cheeks then we'd have to limit doing this and solely use our teeth and tongue for repositioning. would appreciate input from others here in regards to this and what they currently do
Buccinators are supposed to be used in that manner, they keep food against the teeth so they can be broken down. Buccinator atrophy is a complete meme and not true.
I think you're right about the first half but it's true that many people have overly developed buccinators from improper swallowing, that should be atrophied more than they are
@sinned thank you for your input. I have read several pages about the buccinators (thanks for letting me know the proper name btw) and all of them cite difficulty in chewing when they don't function properly, but as @krollic said, they would be supposed to be used only for this specific chewing auxiliary function. Using with swallowing would provoke unnecessary anabolism.
I also cannot stop using them for straw sucking and air blowing/whistling. Does anyone try avoiding these as well?
Skull and Jaw Correction
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