Do Omnivores Need to Chew Meat?

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

As I understand it, meat is more easily digestible than plant matter, for which reason carnivores don’t have molars and tend to gulp down their food while herbivores have molars and many spend quite a lot of time chewing, sometimes in multiple stages. Also, carnivores tend to have shorter digestive tracts than herbivores, for similar reasons.

Question is about omnivores. Omnivores tend to have longer digestive tracts than carnivores, because they do eat plants. So you would think it would be even easier for them to digest meat than it is for carnivores. So if carnivores don’t need to chew meat, then you would think that omnivores certainly don’t need to either.

I don’t think people make any distinction between eating meat versus plants, in terms of chewing. (And people cook meat, which should make it even easier to digest, while plants are frequently eaten raw.) But perhaps that’s purely out of habit. Or perhaps why not - if you have molars anyway, then why not use them - they can only help. But I wonder if there’s anything about omnivores - and people in particular - which makes them need to chew meat while carnivores don’t.

[jz78817]

chewing it makes it easier to swallow, for one thing.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

There are enzymes in saliva that begin the breakdown of proteins and starches. They aren’t strictly critical because the food can get digested later on. Still, they make the process work more efficiently.

To reveal the true nature of the food, our saliva contains digestive enzymes. Each enzyme accelerates a specific chemical reaction that would otherwise proceed too slowly for our purposes. Amylase, for example, helps the water molecules in our saliva to split the chemical bonds between the monosaccharides in starch. The individual sugar units released then bind to “sweet” receptors, which relay the message to the brain that this is indeed nutritious food that is safe to swallow. The same holds for proteins, from which proteases in saliva cut individual amino acids, some of which may stimulate the “umami”-receptor (umami = savoury).

[md2000]

One theory is that humans evolved on the plains of Africa (coming down from the trees) and scavenging the kills of larger predators. As a result, we adapted to partially decomposed and tenderized meat, and since we discovered fire early, we never adapted to eat raw meat the way carnivores do, even though it’s a staple of our diet. Fire breaks down meat the same as aging it does, and more so.

I assume one benefit of chewing is to increase the surface area to volume ratio (ie. reducing thickness), making it easier for those enzymes to attack the entire volume of the food. I wonder about two points - does a carnivore tearing at flesh of a kill substitute for chewing, by also breaking the food down into smaller portions for easier/quicker digestion? Do carnivores digest food slower in order to assure taking full advantage of the lumpier un-chewed food intake?

Of course, for non-mammals (the python swallowing a pig comes to mind) the digestion also proceeds slower because the metabolism is slower.