If the classic TV show sci-fi trope of eating pills for food had became a reality, would humans overtime no longer be able to chew?

tony , 10 months ago

Not pills, but nutritionally complete drinks exist and are fairly popular… there’s a section for them in the local supermarket that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.

Pills would have the same problem as anything else Economics means they’d charge the same or more (because they could) than making food anyway, making it unviable as a complete replacement for most. Or they’d make cheaper ones that were bad for you - like ready meals, you can buy quite healthy ones at a price or get total crap cheap, guess what most buy.

PillowTalk420 , 1 year ago

I like the Fifth Element’s take on “pills for food.”

Put pill on plate, put in a microwave type thing for 2 seconds, pull out an entire roast chicken with fixings.

Mmm… Chikahn! 🤤

Spacebar , 1 year ago

If we don’t chew, our jaws would not develop. The bone growth of our faces would change and our teeth would become incredibly crowded and crooked.

One of the current leading theories for why we now often need braces is called the Soft Foods Theory. The basic idea is that we eat much softer foods than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, so we aren’t stimulating as much bone growth in our jaws when we chew our food, which leaves our teeth with insufficient space to grow in straight.

If we didn’t chew at all and just took pills for food, we’d probably need to get all of our teeth removed as part of growing up, we’d have no chins and we’d all talk much differently than we do now.

A1B1 , 1 year ago

About 900 years ago in China humans developed overbites, previous skulls showed biting edges that aligned, more like apes. The same happened in Europe about 250 years ago. The change was too abrupt to be evolutionary, and the times lined up with the adoption of chopsticks (and the precutting of food to suit) in China and the adoption of knife and fork in Europe. The muscles in our jaws need exercise to develop, like any other muscle. Weakness in these muscles, (experiments support) lead to human development of overbites, which is the norm now. https://www.businessinsider.com/using-cutlery-has-changed-the-human-face-2015-3?r=US&IR=T That may mean if we raised our young on a tougher diet without cutlery or precutting most of that overtbite would not develop and our facial structure would look quite different. And an even less chewy diet would exaggerate the overbite further, over timescales much shorter than evolution takes effect, i,e. It would be a developmental structural change capable of being reversed, not a genetic hereditory change.

mustbe3to20signs , 1 year ago

Since mankind mostly decoupled from natural evolution, we wouldn't develop other mouths. But our look would still change because the jaw muscles wouldn't be trained and maybe our facial expression could become very underdeveloped.