Did you know that digestion starts in the mouth?

From the moment you place food in the mouth and start chewing the digestive process starts. Many factors take place when this happens also called “mastication“. The food gets broken down by the jaws, teeth, tongue and saliva so it is important that they are all working properly for digestion.

Tongue

If the tongue is not able to move in normal ranges of motion than it cannot move the food around the mouth like it should. We often see this when a patient has a “tongue tie”. A tongue tie means that the tissue under the tongue (frenulum) is pulling the tongue down into the floor of the mouth. This results in the tongue not being able to move freely as it needs to when chewing.

Teeth

It is so important to keep all of your teeth for a lifetime. When people start loosing teeth they become unbalanced. They may start favoring chewing on one side of the mouth or even start choosing only certain foods to eat that don’t involve a lot of chewing. The more teeth you loose the harder it is to chew food. Larger pieces are then being swallowed which makes it harder to digest.

Saliva

Saliva plays a big roll in helping break down the food before swallowing. If there is insufficient amounts of saliva in the mouth then the food will not get broken down properly.

Jaws

The jaws are stimulated with chewing forces. Then more forces generated the better so we want to be eating more hard foods. When eating soft foods the jaws become lazy and don’t have to work.