evolutionary wise, very far into the future would we develop different mouths and very few teeth?

Pills as food wouldn’t ever catch on, people like too much about food to just settle on eating pills for the rest of their lives. Even though there is a niche who enjoy huel.

  • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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    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.

  • SpaceBar@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • buycurious@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It could be a possibility.

    That might also mean that companies could look to create things that worked out our teeth and jaws to prevent that from happening (or maybe slow it down).

    • Claymore@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I like to think that it would be something similar to wonderbread - where once we removed all the nutrients from the white bread, we added in vitamins, except instead it would be large chewy pills.

  • Nora@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Humans have decoupled themselves from evolution in the typical sense.

    Survival/gene-elimination cues don’t really apply anymore since we have hospitals and can take car of eachother.

    I think the major remaining factor for our evolution now will either be self guided, or it will be who ever can have sex the most.

  • mustbe3to20signs@feddit.de
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    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.

  • Dale@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It would take a very long time, but eventually teeth would go the way of our tails… that is if we let them.

    Teeth could stick around for any number of reasons like pronunciation in language, or even sexual preference like a decoration. Further, as genetic research and engineering develops with tools like CRISPR CAS-9 proteins the human race will eventually be taking conscious control of our own evolution. Whether we would choose to keep our teeth with a diet of pills is a matter of speculation. I would, but who knows.

  • SeatBeeSate@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    In your own lifespan you would lose your teeth and by consequence most of your jaw. Teeth stimulate your jaw bones and a lot of dental and orthodontic issues may be stemmed from the over prevalence of soft foods.

  • A1B1@lemmy.world
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    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.