Why We Can't Breathe While Swallowing?
IMPORTANT: If you swallow correctly, solids or liquid will go down your esophagus into your stomach. This is because, when your tongue propels the food into your throat, your voice box elevates to close off your trachea, or breathing “pipe.”
if we do, the air we breathe will take our food along with it Inside the lungs and this would almost certainly lead to a horrific, suffocating, painful death.
Food-pipe (esophagus) and windpipe (trachea) are located in close proximity to each other and share a common passageway at the back of our mouths (You can both eat and breathe through your mouth, remember?)
As we swallow, the food/drink do not know the right way down. They will go down any pipe that is open — food pipe or windpipe or both.
To prevent food from going down the wrong pipe, nature has provided us with a ‘flap’ or a ‘door’ called epiglottis. Epiglottis stands atop the windpipe, guarding its opening.
As the tongue pushes the food into the throat to swallow, contraction of various muscles in the area causes the uvula to lift up to block nasal passages and the epiglottis to push down to close the entrance of the windpipe — this way all airways are sealed shut and breathing is temporarily inhibited.
This ‘sealing of airways’ ensures that food goes into the food-pipe. Once the food is swallowed, the muscles in the throat relax, the uvula and the epiglottis open the nasal passages and windpipe, and the breathing once again resumes.
The big blue arrows show the movement of air between swallows. Note in the second picture the sealing of nose and windpipe by uvula and epiglottis.
