A BONE TO PICK (YOUR TEETH WITH)
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This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you tried to bite through a chicken bone?

Bones. When they're in your food they can be a bit tedious, can't they? I mean, they make things taste good, sure, and they're even crucial in dishes like soup and bone marrow. But more often than not you're not supposed to eat them.

That said, far be it from us to tell you what you can and can't do. So, what would happen if you took a juicy chicken drumstick and just chomped down? Could you? Should you?

You should first know that our mouths are a bit more complicated than open and shut. Just like the rest of our body, they have feelings, explains Dr. Edmond Hewlett, professor of dentistry at UCLA and spokesman for the American Dental Association.

You see, when we bite down on something, the soft tissue between our teeth and our jaw senses how hard the thing is we're biting down on, sends a message to our brain and adjusts our bite strength accordingly. This is why when we happen to eat something with a grain of sand, we're able to recoil in horror and not stupidly break our teeth on a very small piece of rock.

"Think about what happens when you touch something very hot with your hand. The pain receptors in our skin trigger a reflex that instantly moves your hand away from heat source," Hewlett writes in an email. "Receptors in our chewing system (teeth, jaw muscles, and the jaw joint) trigger inhibitory reflexes as well, causing the jaw to instantly open when the biting force causes pain in any of these components."

Still, humans are nothing if not determined. While our chewing system (this is the term Hewlett uses) might be able to protect us from an errant bite here or there, it's not exactly equipped to override a brain determined to bite the heck out of a chicken bone.

On average, humans are capable of a bite force of around 170 pounds. That, Hewlett explains, is more than enough to do ourselves some damage. "Someone determined to bite on a bone is at risk for broken teeth and damage to the jaw joint," Hewlett explains.

The extent to which you can hurt yourself depends on how you attempt to bite clean through bone, explains Dr. Ali Nankali, a senior lecturer at Barts and the London Medical and Dental School. Using more teeth would distribute the load a little more evenly, reducing the risk of breaking a tooth. Still, trying to use your mouth like a guillotine is a very bad idea.

"One strong sharp impact of a force can cause periodontal inflammation," Nankali writes in an email. The impact will slightly move the affected tooth out of position. This might seem like no big deal, but if you close your mouth you'll notice that your teeth neatly stack next to each other. A single tooth slightly ajar will rub up against its neighbor, and will definitely not feel right. Nankali describes this as "painful!" Hewlett adds that you can also, obviously, break teeth attempting to bite through a bone โ€” which if are fractured badly enough "cannot be saved and will need to be removed."

If you have fillings, well, biting down on anything hard is really not a good idea since a filled tooth isn't as strong as a healthy one, and is even more likely to break.

Even if your teeth are perfect and indestructible, you still risk injuring the joint that connects your jaw to your skull, known as the temporomandibular joint or the TMJ. "Trauma to the TMJ can range from temporary soreness or pain to more serious conditions involving chronic pain and altered jaw function," says Hewlett. Trying to bite through a chicken bone could change how your chew for the rest of your life.

Now, could you actually bite through a bone? Both Dr. Hewlett and Nankali stress that our incisors, that is our front teeth, have evolved away from that kind of bone-crunching potential. But both think that if you were to chomp down on a less dense part of the bone, closer to the middle, you might be able to grind away at it with your molars, cause a fracture, and eventually break the bone into two. It's something that comes to us naturally.

"Our teeth are relatively strong, and more interestingly the frontal teeth are stronger," explains Nankali. "Yet, because the posterior teeth have more surface area in total they can tolerate more force, and for this reason people bite the stronger objects by their first molars."

So, yes, you could do it. You will most likely hurt yourself and spend many labored minutes gnawing away at the remains of your chicken wing order while the rest of your friends slowly distance themselves from you, the guy who said he could totally bite through a drumstick.

The good news is that, what with human society being at the level that it is now, you will never need to bite through bone. Also many restaurants these days offer boneless options.โ€‹

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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