A Little Biology On The Run

When was the last time you thought much about what happens to the food you are eating? At your next meal - or right now, do me a favor and take a bite of whatever it is you are eating, and immediately began to think about what is happening to that chunk of food disappearing into your body. In layman's terms, you chew it with your teeth, get it chewed-up enough to swallow it, and then you send it on down to your stomach. That's 'eating'. We are today just mostly talking about eating. It is something we all take for granted several times daily. But let us take a brief look at some of the processes and things involved with some of the things that are happening when we eat ...

First, we push in whatever food we want to chew, over/past/through our lips and on into our mouths which are full of teeth. The lips are basically skin-covered strips of muscle and fat that allow us to seal off, from the outside world, stuff we want to eat and drink that we would prefer to keep dust free and not rolling down our shirt fronts. And the lips, beyond introductory eating, also allow us to kiss and whistle (among lots of other useful things). Oh yeah, and they are quite handy in forming words and puckering when we spit, making faces and expressions of all sorts, and so on.