Chewing Lab

This lab showed that chewing different types of food uses different jaw muscle activity for each type of food.  Before the experiment took place I had an idea in my head of how things were going to turn out.  I personally thought that eating the taffy or beef jerkey was going to make the jaw muscle activity go crazy because of how chewy it is.  I was completely wrong because after we did all of our tests, the results showed that for me, taffy and beef jerkey had the least amount of jaw muscle activity out of all four types of food.  The foods we chose to test were an apple, beef jerkey, taffy, and a pickle. The apple and pickle go together because they were 2 types of food that you had to open your mouth really wide to take a bite. Jerkey and taffy could also be put into a "chewy group." You don't have to open your mouth really wide but sometimes with those types of food your jaw starts hurting because you have to chew so much.

The graph shows that for Karen the food that received the least amount of activity was the apple.  For the food that received the highest amount of activity was the pickle. Her number for the pickle was 1.7239 which was considerably higher than the rest of her numbers. Karen was halfway opposite from me because when I ate the apple it had the second most amount of activity. The food that received the lowest amount of jaw muscle activity for me was the taffy. I think this is because when I chew taffy I don't have to open my mouth very wide and that had a lot to do with the muscle activity.  The food that received the highest amount of activity for me was also the pickle, my number was even higher than Karen's, it was 2.2045.  Karen and I decided that foods that force you to open your mouth really wide to take a bite and open your mouth when chewing results in high jaw muscle activity. On the other hand, things like taffy and gum do not force you to open your mouth wide when taking a bite or chewing so that results in lower jaw muscle activity.

This lab was very interesting and even though there were a lot of numbers involved, it was not confusing.  And on the plus side we got to eat!