A computer simulation of the influence of selection and breakage of food on the chewing efficiency of human mastication.

The reduction of food particle sizes during mastication is considered to be the composite result of a selection and breakage process. The chance of a food particle being selected between the teeth was assumed to increase as a power function of the particle's size, whereas the breakage of food particles was described by a cumulative distribution function. The selection and breakage functions were combined with matrix algebra, resulting in a matrix model. By use of this model, particle-size distributions could be calculated after various numbers of chewing cycles. From these distributions, the decrease of the median particle size was determined as a function of the number of chewing cycles. The calculations were performed for various sets of physiologically relevant selection and breakage variables. The number of chewing cycles, N1/2, needed for the initial particle size to be halved was taken as an indication of chewing efficiency. This number varied approximately inversely with both the selection coefficient and the breakage variable. The initial particle size appeared to have the largest influence on N1/2. The theoretical results from the simulation study were also compared with data obtained from experiments on human chewing efficiency.